Not quite 2,000 years ago, a new religious movement arose in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. There was nothing especially startling about this – it was an age that spawned religious movements at a prodigious rate. And this particular movement had little at the outset to set it apart from all the rest, except perhaps for a couple of fairly serious handicaps.
For one thing, it was a sub-sect of a national or tribal religion that already had gained a fairly widespread reputation for rebarbativeness, Judaism. The people of Judea, and their compatriots scattered throughout the empire, were widely seen by their pagan neighbors as alien, rather odd, and at times even atheistic. They declined to eat certain tasty foods, they worshipped an invisible god, they refused to recognize or respect the gods of the pagans, and they had a custom of refusing to do any work at all on the seventh day of each week.
The new movement also suffered, in the eyes of pagan critics, from a serious lack of distinctiveness. Its central narrative involved a god-man born of a virgin, who underwent a severe trial, was killed, and rose from the dead as a savior for those who believed in him. This was very old hat indeed: Pagan mystery cults centered around virtually identical dying-and-resurrected-god narratives had existed for centuries already by the time this new movement came along – those, for example, of Dionysus (Bacchus), Orpheus, Adonis, Attis and, probably most successfully, Osiris/Horus (i.e., the mysteries of Isis).
On the other hand, in a time when originality was valued much less than tradition, the new movement suffered from the very fact that it was, indeed, new. The other mystery-cults could claim chronological precedence and the authority lent by “the test of time.”
A further obstacle faced by the new movement was the philosophical and rhetorical sophistication of the cultural leadership in the world where it was attempting to grow. It was one thing to preach a visionary and emotional message of “good news” and a coming reversal of status to the illiterate and laboring classes; it was quite another to get anyone in authority, political or cultural, to take it seriously.
Largely because of these factors, the first wave, so to speak, of this movement left nary a ripple on the historical record, except for a few letters written by one (or possibly a few) of its most articulate adherents. This letter-writer had experienced first-hand the humiliation of facing pagan sophistication without adequate dialectical firepower (Acts 17:18-33) and perhaps as a result began to preach the virtues of becoming a “fool” for his savior-god and rejecting the counsels of the “wise.”
As time passed, however, the new movement adapted to its environment. Significantly, it distanced itself as much as possible from its roots in Judaism, especially after that nation rebelled against Roman authority and suffered a comprehensive and cataclysmic defeat. It began to put its teachings into writing, and in those writings it declared a hostility to Judaism that matched that of the empire that it increasingly sought to woo to its cause.
In those writings, the new movement also sought to build a case for its philosophical validity – indeed, its superiority – by claiming a sort of vicarious chronological priority. It might be true, they argued, that their founder had lived and died in a very recent time, but his life had been foretold long, long ago – much longer ago, indeed, than any of those other savior-gods had lived and died (and lived again).
The groundwork for this argument had been laid by a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, who lived at roughly the same time as the new savior-god but whose project was to demonstrate that Moses – to whom, in keeping with tradition, he attributed the authorship of the foundational texts of Judaism – was in fact a philosopher – indeed, the greatest of philosophers – whose teachings represented a sort of quantum leap above the pagan philosophers because 1.) Moses lived much longer ago than they did, and 2.) his philosophy originated not from human reasoning but from divine revelation, and so was complete in a way that the merely human conclusions of pagan philosophers could not be.
The advocates of the new religious movement – apologists, as they’re called – happily adopted Philo’s rhetorical strategy and conclusions, and then took things much further.
Yes, they said, the writings of Moses and the Jewish prophets are much, much older than anything you pagans can offer (except perhaps the Egyptians, and no one understands their stuff anyway). But unbeknown to the Jews, their texts were foretelling the coming of our savior-god. In fact, their account of the history of the world from its very creation is really secretly an account of God’s plan to save humankind through the life, death and resurrection of our savior-god.
Now, plainly, this interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures required a certain amount of intellectual squinting. The apologists had to patch together widely separated verses and create a lot of doubtful equivalences, chief among which was the equating of the new movement’s savior-god with the hoped-for “messiah” of the Jews. This was a rather dubious enterprise, seeing as how the messiah clearly was expected to be a temporal, political leader who would “restore Israel” to its rightful independence and prominence among the nations of the world; while the movement’s savior-god had died ignominiously and obscurely without the slightest direct effect on Israel’s status as a nation.
What the apologists did to overcome this objection was to declare – and to inscribe into their own “scriptures” – that what the messianic prophecies had foretold, and what their own savior-god had accomplished, was the institution of a spiritual, “heavenly” kingdom that superseded the earthly kingdom of Israel.
That’s a neat rhetorical trick, and nothing more, and not many people early on were taken in by it, least of all the bulk of the Jewish nation. But the apologists had an even better trick up their sleeves that also didn’t fool many people at the time, but which they continue to play even today, and surprisingly with better results now.
It’s a variation, or more accurately an extension, of the prophetic claim. The early apologists argued (if you can call it an argument) that the Hebrew scriptures told a story that the authors themselves didn’t understand. The authors thought they were telling the story of the relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people, but “we know better” – they were really telling the story of how God knew humankind would blunder into a state of unredeemable sinfulness, and he would enter into human existence at a certain time and place and fix the whole thing.
Okay, a lot of people (Christians all) have accepted this reading of the Hebrew scriptures over the centuries. But the apologists pushed this line of argument even further. In their time, there were lots of texts besides the Hebrew scriptures that were regarded as spirtually informative, from the deliberate writings of Plato to the recorded spontaneous utterances of the Pythoness of Delphi and the Cumean Sybil. There were all those mystery-cults, there were the long-standing and highly respected religious traditions of Persia (Zoroastrianism), Babylon, Egypt, and the native cults of every nation from Armenia to Greece to Rome to Gaul to Britain.
The adherents of the new movement acquired a bad reputation early on for frontally assaulting everyone else’s beliefs. But as time went on, they got a bit more subtle. They began acknowledging that the various pagan belief-systems contained an element of truth. But they went on to claim that any such kernel of truth served only to mislead.
You see, only when the movement’s own savior-god descended from timelessness into earthly manifestation did the full truth about existence become knowable. So anyone who sought to find truth before that could only have discovered a partial, and therefore untrue, truth – at best a “foreshadowing” of the full truth, just as the Hebrew scriptures “foreshadowed” the savior’s coming.
Worse, the eternal enemy of truth, Satan, was at large in the world long before the savior made his descent. But Satan knew that moment was coming (I’m not sure how; maybe the idea is that God told him to “test” us) and so he made it his business to confuse people’s minds by creating false precursors – anticipatory parodies – of the true savior.
Overall, the message of the apologists was this: The one and only god has made his one and only entry into material reality at this one and only time and place, and everything that anyone said or will say about divinity or spirituality is either a prediction of this one event or a lie intended to make you overlook it.
These were neat rhetorical tricks, but they didn’t fool many people in ancient times. The new movement remained very much a minority sect – its members far outnumbered by the devotees of Isis, certainly, and probably those of Mithras as well – until the Emperor Constantine threw the weight of his rule and his army behind it in the mid-fourth century.
Following this development, the apologists for the new movement came up with yet another sophism that still affects thinking about these things today: The fact that the new movement eventually gained enough power to crush all of its competitors demonstrates that God wanted this movement to “triumph” over all the other religious tendencies of the age.
The movement in question has of course splintered over the intervening centuries, but it’s interesting to note how much the various factions still rely on the same sophisms in their continuing project of dominating or eliminating the competition. That competition has broadened in ways that no one could have imagined in Constantine’s time, to include Islam and Buddhism and, perhaps most dangerously, the naturalist-materialist worldview.
If today’s apologists would just back away from some of their pointlessly but insistently held dogmatic positions – especially the claim to an exclusive, unique knowledge of divine truth – we might all make more progress toward real spiritual growth and social harmony. But alas, I fear that the apologists and their churches really have little regard for such things, and are really interested mostly in worldly power, and always have been.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Forget Darwin
My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.
The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.
This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”
What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.
Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.
Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.
However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.
Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.
For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.
All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.
From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.
Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.
After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.
This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.
The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.
This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.
That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.
But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.
The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.
This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”
What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.
Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.
Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.
However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.
Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.
For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.
All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.
From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.
Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.
After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.
This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.
The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.
This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.
That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.
But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The Amoral and the Immoral
One night recently, I was watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and was introduced to a writer named Sam Harris who was plugging his new book, The Moral Landscape. The discussion indicated that the topic of the book is Mr. Harris’ claim that science can be used to produce or discover moral facts or principles, and should replace or supersede religion as a source of moral understanding.
My immediate response was, “Bunkum!” or some less nice words to that effect.
I haven’t read the book, nor have I read any of Mr. Harris’ previous works, though I have learned by visiting his website that he is one of those people who believe religion is bad, science is good, and the two are opposed, and that he has received praise from, among others, Richard Dawkins.
From what I read on Mr. Harris’ site, it appears that he agrees with Dr. Dawkins that religion is an unnecessary excresence on human history and we would all be much better off if it would just go away. (Dawkins, of course, has expressed the opinion (in The God Delusion) that religious belief only persists because of bad parenting, and if “we” could just stop people from propagating these erroneous beliefs, religion would indeed just go away, and we could all go forward with an ideal life in a science-ruled world. More about that later.)
I also learned from a column that Mr. Harris wrote for the Huffington Post that he is dismayed by his observation that many scientists agree with many religious believers (including me) in concluding that science simply is not equipped to deal with moral principles: It can study what people say and do about morality, but it can’t say what is or is not truly moral.
This is in fact the most serious roadblock that the pro-science crowd has found to its agenda of eliminating religious belief and basing all social, political and personal life on scientific principles. My impression – and I must reiterate that it’s based on the one interview and a fairly speedy reading of the online sources – is that Mr. Harris has written his new book precisely in order to try to knock down this obstacle and clear the way for the Golden Age of Scientific Rule.
I don’t plan to read the book itself because I think I have better things to do with my time than waste it reading something I already know is an exercise in futility. That may sound narrow-minded, but in fact it’s based on a thoroughly rational appraisal of the prospects. As it happens, there’s an airtight and surprisingly simple argument:
1. “Nature,” by which I mean the aggregate of physical data that modern science restricts itself to studying, is inherently amoral. There is no moral good or bad in the physical cause-and-effect processes that materialist scientists insist are the sum total of what the universe is. Ultimately, it’s all random.
2. “Rationality,” by which I mean in this instance the use of more-or-less-formal logic, is also inherently amoral. Logical analysis says nothing about whether a conclusion is morally good or bad, only whether that conclusion is based on a valid argument.
3. “Science,” then, if defined as the application of rationality to natural phenomena, is inherently amoral: Its objects of study and its manner of study offer neither moral content nor moral analysis (AIAO: Amorality In, Amorality Out).
Thus, if a scientist is proposing moral principles or advocating a course of action as morally positive, he or she must be basing this proposition or advocacy on something other than science. In practice, of course, the moral principle generally is inserted into the discourse at the beginning as an assumption. (Harris seems to be assuming that a scientific morality would somehow be “more moral” than one based on religion, because science is better than religion as an understanding of reality.)
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has addressed these issues in considerable detail in Sources of the Self and has shown that the adherents of the atheistic/materialistic/secular-humanistic worldview(s) are unable to account, using their own logic, for the moral principles they espouse. Their moral imperatives exist as part of our Western cultural legacy, having entered the cultural stream from religious sources, but are treated as “self-evident” because the proponents of this view can't allow themselves to acknowledge the original religious source.
In general, what the atheist/secularist crowd espouses are the “Enlightenment” values of individual liberty and humanitarianism. And certainly there’s nothing wrong with them as values. But based on their own materialist-rationalist principles, the atheists-secularists can’t explain why these things are worth valuing.
Absent such an explanation, it becomes easy for some people to conclude that they aren’t truly worth valuing. This then allows them to proceed to behave with disregard for others’ liberty or well-being, as in Social Darwinism, Objectivism, Straussianism, etc.
Harris’ approach apparently relies at least in part on “human flourishing” as a yardstick of value, but Taylor has already shown the inadequacy — indeed, the danger — of that standard.
Obviously, how one defines “flourishing” has a major effect on what one wants to propose as a moral good. If “flourishing” means mere physical well-being, for instance, the argument must tend toward the kind of hedonistic, consumeristic society we already live in, and which so many of us find objectionable on various levels, including the environmental and the spiritual.
Which raises another objection: Obviously, if one automatically rejects religion as a moral source, one is rejecting spirituality as a moral value. So any moral system one constructs on that basis will offer no satisfaction for anyone who believes in the reality of spiritual rewards. And it will automatically denigrate any system or society that does accord value to spirituality, while overrating a system or society that ignores spiritual value or meaning and looks instead at physical well-being as a standard.
Of course, the pro-science crowd delights in detailing the many abuses that have been committed in the name of religion, and there certainly is no denying that terrible abuses have occurred, and continue to occur. But the advocates of science as a standard are far less inclined to take note of the rather unencouraging track record of science and scientists on moral issues in the relatively short time they’ve had the upper hand.
Individuals pursuing an amorally conceived science have, notoriously, placed their work at the disposal of morally dubious governments such as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. (And one might note that the USSR was ruled according to an atheistic-materialistic ideology, which didn’t prevent it from killing as many as 60 million people (Solzhenitsyn’s estimate) in programs of collectivization, forced migration and forced labor.)
Then there are the morally dubious projects of governments regarded in the West as more legitimate, such as the recently revealed deliberate infection of 696 men and women in Guatemala with syphilis by U.S. researchers in the 1940s. Add that one to the Tuskegee experiments, the eugenics projects in which women were sterilized based upon their race and class, the CIA experiments in mind control using LSD and God knows what else, and let us not forget the atomic bomb, poison gas and biological warfare.
None of these things could have proceeded without the willing participation of scientists. What it all ultimately demonstrates is the obvious fact that the amoral includes the immoral.
No doubt, the researchers in all these projects argued that their work helped save American lives, thus serving a “greater good.” This is precisely why utilitarianism is worthless as a moral source: In the pursuit of the “greatest good for the greatest number,” everything depends on who decides what the “greatest good” is and how they decide it, and how much evil they’re willing to inflict on the lesser number. A less "scientific" view of morality might propose that inflicting horrible suffering on even one person is wrong.
Scientists go where the funding is, of course. When the funding is provided by the government, they do the work the government wants, such as creating weapons of mass destruction. Today, of course, they mostly are placing their work at the disposal of profit-seeking corporations, sometimes because that’s where the government funding (i.e., yours and my tax dollars) is being funneled. That’s one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has grown so huge.
And here is an example of amorality serving amorality. The “science” of economics — according to some of its practitioners, generally those who are viewed most favorably by large corporations — informs us that one reason governments must not try to regulate business is because doing so injects moral considerations into markets that will “flourish” best by operating unimpededly according to “nature.”
As Taylor’s work shows, modern science and the worldviews it has most strongly influenced are geared toward the control and exploitation of Nature, including human nature. And there have been many people in the past couple of centuries who sincerely believed they were part of a movement toward the overall improvement of human life through that type of manipulation. And improvements obviously have been made by some measurements, though there also have been obvious losses.
But for every selfless philanthropist or courageous existentialist (a la Camus’ Dr. Rieux, admittedly a fictional character), there have been multitudes of social-Darwinist, para-Nietzschean scoundrels and bullies whose only interest in science is determining how it can help them increase their wealth and power.
Time and again, the resistance to such people and their bogus ideologies has come from people motivated by religious belief — because it’s only because of such belief that we can arrive at a point of view that sees something better or higher than the things of this physical world.
I don’t believe religion, or religious aspiration, can be eradicated. Unlike Dr. Dawkins, I don’t think it’s a purely cultural-educational phenomenon. I think it’s a basic constituent of human nature, because the divine is a basic formative and ordering principle of reality.
But it does worry me that there are people who believe it can and ought to be eradicated, people who are involved in creating drugs and machines that can do great harm to our minds and souls, and who have considerable clout with our lawmakers and sociocultural opinion-shapers.
In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the authorities found it expedient to classify dissidents as psychologically aberrant rather than politically unorthodox, and to confine them in mental hospitals instead of labor camps. It seems to me that the biggest difference between here and there, now and then, is that in the United States we’re letting ourselves be persuaded into self-medicating ourselves into irrelevance, into letting “the system” decide what’s best for everyone.
When we live in a world where resistance to abuse or stupidity can be “diagnosed” as “oppositional defiant disorder,” we really need to think carefully about what we value and how we can know what is truly good or evil.
My immediate response was, “Bunkum!” or some less nice words to that effect.
I haven’t read the book, nor have I read any of Mr. Harris’ previous works, though I have learned by visiting his website that he is one of those people who believe religion is bad, science is good, and the two are opposed, and that he has received praise from, among others, Richard Dawkins.
From what I read on Mr. Harris’ site, it appears that he agrees with Dr. Dawkins that religion is an unnecessary excresence on human history and we would all be much better off if it would just go away. (Dawkins, of course, has expressed the opinion (in The God Delusion) that religious belief only persists because of bad parenting, and if “we” could just stop people from propagating these erroneous beliefs, religion would indeed just go away, and we could all go forward with an ideal life in a science-ruled world. More about that later.)
I also learned from a column that Mr. Harris wrote for the Huffington Post that he is dismayed by his observation that many scientists agree with many religious believers (including me) in concluding that science simply is not equipped to deal with moral principles: It can study what people say and do about morality, but it can’t say what is or is not truly moral.
This is in fact the most serious roadblock that the pro-science crowd has found to its agenda of eliminating religious belief and basing all social, political and personal life on scientific principles. My impression – and I must reiterate that it’s based on the one interview and a fairly speedy reading of the online sources – is that Mr. Harris has written his new book precisely in order to try to knock down this obstacle and clear the way for the Golden Age of Scientific Rule.
I don’t plan to read the book itself because I think I have better things to do with my time than waste it reading something I already know is an exercise in futility. That may sound narrow-minded, but in fact it’s based on a thoroughly rational appraisal of the prospects. As it happens, there’s an airtight and surprisingly simple argument:
1. “Nature,” by which I mean the aggregate of physical data that modern science restricts itself to studying, is inherently amoral. There is no moral good or bad in the physical cause-and-effect processes that materialist scientists insist are the sum total of what the universe is. Ultimately, it’s all random.
2. “Rationality,” by which I mean in this instance the use of more-or-less-formal logic, is also inherently amoral. Logical analysis says nothing about whether a conclusion is morally good or bad, only whether that conclusion is based on a valid argument.
3. “Science,” then, if defined as the application of rationality to natural phenomena, is inherently amoral: Its objects of study and its manner of study offer neither moral content nor moral analysis (AIAO: Amorality In, Amorality Out).
Thus, if a scientist is proposing moral principles or advocating a course of action as morally positive, he or she must be basing this proposition or advocacy on something other than science. In practice, of course, the moral principle generally is inserted into the discourse at the beginning as an assumption. (Harris seems to be assuming that a scientific morality would somehow be “more moral” than one based on religion, because science is better than religion as an understanding of reality.)
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has addressed these issues in considerable detail in Sources of the Self and has shown that the adherents of the atheistic/materialistic/secular-humanistic worldview(s) are unable to account, using their own logic, for the moral principles they espouse. Their moral imperatives exist as part of our Western cultural legacy, having entered the cultural stream from religious sources, but are treated as “self-evident” because the proponents of this view can't allow themselves to acknowledge the original religious source.
In general, what the atheist/secularist crowd espouses are the “Enlightenment” values of individual liberty and humanitarianism. And certainly there’s nothing wrong with them as values. But based on their own materialist-rationalist principles, the atheists-secularists can’t explain why these things are worth valuing.
Absent such an explanation, it becomes easy for some people to conclude that they aren’t truly worth valuing. This then allows them to proceed to behave with disregard for others’ liberty or well-being, as in Social Darwinism, Objectivism, Straussianism, etc.
Harris’ approach apparently relies at least in part on “human flourishing” as a yardstick of value, but Taylor has already shown the inadequacy — indeed, the danger — of that standard.
Obviously, how one defines “flourishing” has a major effect on what one wants to propose as a moral good. If “flourishing” means mere physical well-being, for instance, the argument must tend toward the kind of hedonistic, consumeristic society we already live in, and which so many of us find objectionable on various levels, including the environmental and the spiritual.
Which raises another objection: Obviously, if one automatically rejects religion as a moral source, one is rejecting spirituality as a moral value. So any moral system one constructs on that basis will offer no satisfaction for anyone who believes in the reality of spiritual rewards. And it will automatically denigrate any system or society that does accord value to spirituality, while overrating a system or society that ignores spiritual value or meaning and looks instead at physical well-being as a standard.
Of course, the pro-science crowd delights in detailing the many abuses that have been committed in the name of religion, and there certainly is no denying that terrible abuses have occurred, and continue to occur. But the advocates of science as a standard are far less inclined to take note of the rather unencouraging track record of science and scientists on moral issues in the relatively short time they’ve had the upper hand.
Individuals pursuing an amorally conceived science have, notoriously, placed their work at the disposal of morally dubious governments such as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. (And one might note that the USSR was ruled according to an atheistic-materialistic ideology, which didn’t prevent it from killing as many as 60 million people (Solzhenitsyn’s estimate) in programs of collectivization, forced migration and forced labor.)
Then there are the morally dubious projects of governments regarded in the West as more legitimate, such as the recently revealed deliberate infection of 696 men and women in Guatemala with syphilis by U.S. researchers in the 1940s. Add that one to the Tuskegee experiments, the eugenics projects in which women were sterilized based upon their race and class, the CIA experiments in mind control using LSD and God knows what else, and let us not forget the atomic bomb, poison gas and biological warfare.
None of these things could have proceeded without the willing participation of scientists. What it all ultimately demonstrates is the obvious fact that the amoral includes the immoral.
No doubt, the researchers in all these projects argued that their work helped save American lives, thus serving a “greater good.” This is precisely why utilitarianism is worthless as a moral source: In the pursuit of the “greatest good for the greatest number,” everything depends on who decides what the “greatest good” is and how they decide it, and how much evil they’re willing to inflict on the lesser number. A less "scientific" view of morality might propose that inflicting horrible suffering on even one person is wrong.
Scientists go where the funding is, of course. When the funding is provided by the government, they do the work the government wants, such as creating weapons of mass destruction. Today, of course, they mostly are placing their work at the disposal of profit-seeking corporations, sometimes because that’s where the government funding (i.e., yours and my tax dollars) is being funneled. That’s one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has grown so huge.
And here is an example of amorality serving amorality. The “science” of economics — according to some of its practitioners, generally those who are viewed most favorably by large corporations — informs us that one reason governments must not try to regulate business is because doing so injects moral considerations into markets that will “flourish” best by operating unimpededly according to “nature.”
As Taylor’s work shows, modern science and the worldviews it has most strongly influenced are geared toward the control and exploitation of Nature, including human nature. And there have been many people in the past couple of centuries who sincerely believed they were part of a movement toward the overall improvement of human life through that type of manipulation. And improvements obviously have been made by some measurements, though there also have been obvious losses.
But for every selfless philanthropist or courageous existentialist (a la Camus’ Dr. Rieux, admittedly a fictional character), there have been multitudes of social-Darwinist, para-Nietzschean scoundrels and bullies whose only interest in science is determining how it can help them increase their wealth and power.
Time and again, the resistance to such people and their bogus ideologies has come from people motivated by religious belief — because it’s only because of such belief that we can arrive at a point of view that sees something better or higher than the things of this physical world.
I don’t believe religion, or religious aspiration, can be eradicated. Unlike Dr. Dawkins, I don’t think it’s a purely cultural-educational phenomenon. I think it’s a basic constituent of human nature, because the divine is a basic formative and ordering principle of reality.
But it does worry me that there are people who believe it can and ought to be eradicated, people who are involved in creating drugs and machines that can do great harm to our minds and souls, and who have considerable clout with our lawmakers and sociocultural opinion-shapers.
In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the authorities found it expedient to classify dissidents as psychologically aberrant rather than politically unorthodox, and to confine them in mental hospitals instead of labor camps. It seems to me that the biggest difference between here and there, now and then, is that in the United States we’re letting ourselves be persuaded into self-medicating ourselves into irrelevance, into letting “the system” decide what’s best for everyone.
When we live in a world where resistance to abuse or stupidity can be “diagnosed” as “oppositional defiant disorder,” we really need to think carefully about what we value and how we can know what is truly good or evil.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
2B1
I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”
If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.
Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.
Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.
Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.
Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.
This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:
And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)
The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.
If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.
Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.
Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.
Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.
Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.
This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:
“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”
And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)
The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?
Certainly.
But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.
Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ
I want to adopt – or probably more accurately, to instigate – a convention for the use of the word “philosophy.” What I’m proposing is to use a capital P to refer to what was discussed and practiced in ancient Greece and successively into the Roman period, and a small p for everything else.
There are, I think, good reasons for doing this. It was after all the Greeks who created and defined the term φιλοσοφια to describe what they were doing. It would be reasonable to reserve the use of the word to references to that particular set of activities and to find some other word to refer to activities that are significantly different, even if the latter are in some way derived from or imitative of the former. However, there is no generic term other than “philosophy” for the numerous schools and tendencies of thought that have arisen since the fall of Rome, so I’m proposing that we recognize the distinction by treating the word as a proper noun for Philosophy properly so-called and not so for everything else.
And there most definitely is a significant distinction between what was practiced and taught in the Hellenic and Hellenistic schools of Philosophy and the so-called philosophy that came to be practiced and taught after and outside them. The two began to diverge even during the heyday of Philosophy when Christian apologists and other religion-focused groups (the so-called Gnostics and Hermetists or Hermeticists, for example) began to appropriate ideas, terms and practices from the Philosophical schools in an attempt to give themselves intellectual respectability.
This disingenuous tendency is apparent already in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, whose project was to allegorize the Hebrew scriptures into an exposition of Platonic doctrine and Moses into a philosopher, and then to claim priority and superiority for the Mosaic writings. The Gospel of John goes Philo one better by rendering the narrative of Jesus’ life as an exemplification of philosophical theology that trumps both the Philosophers and the Jews.
By the third century, this project was in full swing in Alexandria, where Clement and Origen both embraced Philosophy with both arms. If one accepts their self-explanation, Philosophy was true but incomplete, and the Christian revelation was precisely what was needed to complete it. On a somewhat less tendentious reading, Christianity was indeed a “revealed” religion, with all the raw, emotional, even self-contradictory details that accompany any visionary breakthrough. It needed some intellectual reinforcement to make it palatable – indeed, to make it understandable – to a theologically sophisticated audience.
It’s from this point, and for these reasons, that the tendency grew to regard philosophy as “the handmaid of theology,” which prevailed until the Renaissance. The Christian (and later the Muslim) theologians happily pilfered or cherry-picked the findings of a millennium of hard-won Philosophical teaching to augment their own arguments, while denigrating the Philosophers themselves and ultimately shutting down their schools and sending them into exile.
When the grip of the church(es) over intellectual life finally began to ease, a large part of the legacy of the domination of theology over philosophy played out as a rejection of theology in all its forms by the newer thinkers. In particular, the new philosophers from Erasmus and Ficino forward seem to have focused exclusively on the content of philosophical discourse while ignoring or rejecting the Philosophical practices that had formed the basis of monastic life and Medieval mysticism.
That the Philosophical schools were in fact the model for Christian monasticism is at this point undeniable.
The late Pierre Hadot established with impeccable scholarship the fact that Philosophy was at least as much a “way of life” as a project of research into the principles of existence, and that the two were inseparable:
Hadot, as befits an academic scholar, proceeds cautiously in these matters, drawing almost entirely on the writings of the philosophers themselves and rejecting suggestions that Philosophy was in any way a development from, for example, shamanism. (He does, however, accept in a sort of postscript that the Philosophical schools might have received some influence from India, specifically from yoga.) However, with no academic reputation to protect, I can range a bit further.
What I would point out first is that the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” as found in the Philokalia, for example, clearly show that the early Christian monastics’ understanding of “metaphysical anatomy,” so to speak, is precisely that of the Philosophers, and in particular that of the Platonists: the lower, “irrational” soul consisting of a desiring (“appetitive”) and an emotional (“incensive”) component; the rational soul (διανοια, dianoia, or discursive, dualistic reasoning faculty); and the νους (nous, the unitive, intuitive, holistic understanding). Moreover, the goal of monastic practice is precisely the same as that of the Platonist schools: to extricate the practitioner from over-involvement in physical reality and “turn” him or her toward the “higher,” truer reality of Form and, ultimately, God.
As Plotinus states quite specifically (Ennead 1.1.3), one goal of Philosophy is to turn the soul away from its desire for matter and turn it toward reason and the beyond-reason of nous. How is this done? In one important passage (VI.7.36), he writes:
And in another key passage, Plotinus writes:
What we are seeing here are obviously references to some form of what we call meditation today. In Plotinus’ time, the Latin words meditatio and contemplatio referred to two different modes of mental activity, meditatio being “discursive” and dualistic, contemplatio being non-dualistic and unitive. Those terms remained standard in the Western Church until the 20th century. In Greek, the equivalent of contemplatio is θεορια (theoria); various words and phrases (e.g., συννοια, sunnoia) refer to introspection generally and may be translated as “meditation.”
The point, now that I’ve finished with the footnotes and glosses and flourishes, is that a school of Philosophy, in its practices, bore much more resemblance to, for example, a Buddhist monastery than to a modern university’s Department of Philosophy. And not just in its practices, but equally in its goals. No matter how much lip-service modern educators may pay to the idea of turning out “well-rounded” individuals (and in fact they’re advocating that approach much less these days than they did a few decades ago), what they’re really about is preparing people to become cogs in the machinery of the modern global economy.
From that point of view, absolutely the last thing our educational system wants to do is turn people away from physical objects and desires and toward a real, heartfelt understanding of the oneness and wholeness of reality. But that’s the one thing each of us needs if we – and our world – are to be healed and whole.
There are, I think, good reasons for doing this. It was after all the Greeks who created and defined the term φιλοσοφια to describe what they were doing. It would be reasonable to reserve the use of the word to references to that particular set of activities and to find some other word to refer to activities that are significantly different, even if the latter are in some way derived from or imitative of the former. However, there is no generic term other than “philosophy” for the numerous schools and tendencies of thought that have arisen since the fall of Rome, so I’m proposing that we recognize the distinction by treating the word as a proper noun for Philosophy properly so-called and not so for everything else.
And there most definitely is a significant distinction between what was practiced and taught in the Hellenic and Hellenistic schools of Philosophy and the so-called philosophy that came to be practiced and taught after and outside them. The two began to diverge even during the heyday of Philosophy when Christian apologists and other religion-focused groups (the so-called Gnostics and Hermetists or Hermeticists, for example) began to appropriate ideas, terms and practices from the Philosophical schools in an attempt to give themselves intellectual respectability.
This disingenuous tendency is apparent already in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, whose project was to allegorize the Hebrew scriptures into an exposition of Platonic doctrine and Moses into a philosopher, and then to claim priority and superiority for the Mosaic writings. The Gospel of John goes Philo one better by rendering the narrative of Jesus’ life as an exemplification of philosophical theology that trumps both the Philosophers and the Jews.
By the third century, this project was in full swing in Alexandria, where Clement and Origen both embraced Philosophy with both arms. If one accepts their self-explanation, Philosophy was true but incomplete, and the Christian revelation was precisely what was needed to complete it. On a somewhat less tendentious reading, Christianity was indeed a “revealed” religion, with all the raw, emotional, even self-contradictory details that accompany any visionary breakthrough. It needed some intellectual reinforcement to make it palatable – indeed, to make it understandable – to a theologically sophisticated audience.
It’s from this point, and for these reasons, that the tendency grew to regard philosophy as “the handmaid of theology,” which prevailed until the Renaissance. The Christian (and later the Muslim) theologians happily pilfered or cherry-picked the findings of a millennium of hard-won Philosophical teaching to augment their own arguments, while denigrating the Philosophers themselves and ultimately shutting down their schools and sending them into exile.
When the grip of the church(es) over intellectual life finally began to ease, a large part of the legacy of the domination of theology over philosophy played out as a rejection of theology in all its forms by the newer thinkers. In particular, the new philosophers from Erasmus and Ficino forward seem to have focused exclusively on the content of philosophical discourse while ignoring or rejecting the Philosophical practices that had formed the basis of monastic life and Medieval mysticism.
That the Philosophical schools were in fact the model for Christian monasticism is at this point undeniable.
The late Pierre Hadot established with impeccable scholarship the fact that Philosophy was at least as much a “way of life” as a project of research into the principles of existence, and that the two were inseparable:
… there can be no question of denying the extraordinary ability of the ancient philosophers to develop theoretical reflection on the most subtle problems of the theory of knowledge, logic or physics. This theoretical activity, however, must be situated within a perspective which is different from that which corresponds to the idea people usually have of philosophy. In the first place, at least since the time of Socrates, the choice of a way of life has not been located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary, it stands at the beginning … Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choice of life and an existential option – not vice versa. … The [ancient] philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way. This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world. (Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase, p. 3. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002.)In the same work, Hadot goes on to describe a general curriculum of the Philosophical schools, running from ethics to physics to psychology to theology, which can be found consistently across schools as far apart in their “theoretical” teachings as the Platonists and Stoics. He also enumerates a number of what he calls “spiritual exercises” that likewise are found across the Philosophical spectrum, such as meditating on the inevitability of death and cultivating a “cosmic” view of life. And unsurprisingly, he shows how these exercises continued to be essential in the writings and practices of the early Christian monastics.
Hadot, as befits an academic scholar, proceeds cautiously in these matters, drawing almost entirely on the writings of the philosophers themselves and rejecting suggestions that Philosophy was in any way a development from, for example, shamanism. (He does, however, accept in a sort of postscript that the Philosophical schools might have received some influence from India, specifically from yoga.) However, with no academic reputation to protect, I can range a bit further.
What I would point out first is that the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” as found in the Philokalia, for example, clearly show that the early Christian monastics’ understanding of “metaphysical anatomy,” so to speak, is precisely that of the Philosophers, and in particular that of the Platonists: the lower, “irrational” soul consisting of a desiring (“appetitive”) and an emotional (“incensive”) component; the rational soul (διανοια, dianoia, or discursive, dualistic reasoning faculty); and the νους (nous, the unitive, intuitive, holistic understanding). Moreover, the goal of monastic practice is precisely the same as that of the Platonist schools: to extricate the practitioner from over-involvement in physical reality and “turn” him or her toward the “higher,” truer reality of Form and, ultimately, God.
As Plotinus states quite specifically (Ennead 1.1.3), one goal of Philosophy is to turn the soul away from its desire for matter and turn it toward reason and the beyond-reason of nous. How is this done? In one important passage (VI.7.36), he writes:
We are taught about it by comparisons and negations and knowledge of the things which come from it and certain methods of ascent by degrees, but we are put on the way to it by purifications and virtues and adornings … [emphasis added]
And in another key passage, Plotinus writes:
How can one see the inconceivable beauty which stays within the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see it? Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendors which he saw before. … Shut your eyes, and change to, and wake, another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use. (I.6.8; emphasis added. Both translations are by A.H. Armstrong in the Loeb Classical Library edition, published by Harvard University Press.)
What we are seeing here are obviously references to some form of what we call meditation today. In Plotinus’ time, the Latin words meditatio and contemplatio referred to two different modes of mental activity, meditatio being “discursive” and dualistic, contemplatio being non-dualistic and unitive. Those terms remained standard in the Western Church until the 20th century. In Greek, the equivalent of contemplatio is θεορια (theoria); various words and phrases (e.g., συννοια, sunnoia) refer to introspection generally and may be translated as “meditation.”
The point, now that I’ve finished with the footnotes and glosses and flourishes, is that a school of Philosophy, in its practices, bore much more resemblance to, for example, a Buddhist monastery than to a modern university’s Department of Philosophy. And not just in its practices, but equally in its goals. No matter how much lip-service modern educators may pay to the idea of turning out “well-rounded” individuals (and in fact they’re advocating that approach much less these days than they did a few decades ago), what they’re really about is preparing people to become cogs in the machinery of the modern global economy.
From that point of view, absolutely the last thing our educational system wants to do is turn people away from physical objects and desires and toward a real, heartfelt understanding of the oneness and wholeness of reality. But that’s the one thing each of us needs if we – and our world – are to be healed and whole.
Monday, July 19, 2010
A Sense of Proportion
Considering the high value we seem, as a society or culture, to accord rationality as a standard for thinking and behavior, one might expect that we have a very clear understanding of what the word means. But when I started looking into this issue a few years ago, I discovered very quickly that almost no one can give a clear account of what constitutes rationality.
For most people, rationality is one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” concepts. It floats around in our world, we hear it in various contexts, and we form impressions of it based on how we hear it being used. But no one defines it when they use it, they just assume that everyone knows what they mean, and we who hear them likewise assume that we know what they mean.
When I started asking, “What is rationality?” and “What does it mean to be rational?” naturally the first place I looked was in dictionaries. What I found there was unhelpful. In the first instance, I was told that rationality is “reason” or “reasonableness,” and of course I quickly discovered that “reason” is rationality.
I also learned that both “reasonable” and “rational” are synonyms for “sane,” and obviously that “unreasonable” and “irrational” are synonyms for “insane.” This means the stakes in the game of deciding what’s rational and what isn’t are pretty high: If I can label you and/or your ideas “irrational,” I automatically win, and you go into a padded cell.
Since no one seemed to be interested in defining rationality in a clear and precise way, I turned to the etymology of the word to see if that would offer any clues. And not surprisingly, this led me straight back to ancient philosophy.
The word “rational” obviously derives from the Latin word ratio, originally meaning “reckoning” or “calculating” but also having the same meaning as the mathematical term “ratio,” which refers to a numerical relationship. A month is one-twelfth of a year, for example: 1/12.
The Latin word, in turn, was a translation of a Greek word, because it was the Greeks who first articulated these kinds of relationships. The word that the Greeks used to name a statement about this kind of mathematical relationship is a familiar one: logos.
Modern Christians are familiar with logos because of the famous prologue to the gospel of John. But the standard translation of logos as “word” overlooks the history and wide range of meanings of this multifarious word. At the time John’s gospel was written, logos had a 300-year or more history as a technical philosophical term. It meant, among other things, a saying or aphorism, an axiom, an account or explanation, and most importantly for our present topic, it meant “a proportion” – in other words, the same thing as ratio. And this is why the words “rational” and “logical” are essentially equivalent: because they both refer to proportionality.
Whether you say it in Latin, Greek or English, a ratio or a proportion is a comparison of or relationship between two things: between a month and a year, for example. And this is the root-concept of rationality: the comparison or relating of things to other things.
Under the influence of Aristotle, we have come to understand logic and rationality in terms of statements about reality. Indeed, a significant part of philosophy in the 20th century turned away from attempting to understand reality as such and focused instead on the structure and coherence of statements about reality. But if we look at the fundamental meaning of rationality and logic, we can see that these terms need not apply only to what we say about reality, to “well-formed formulas” about the universe.
On the contrary, any system of comparing and ranking things is, by definition, rational or logical. For example, we can judge our sensory experiences by how pleasant or unpleasant we find them: Getting laid is more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Or we can rate and rank experiences according to how they affect us emotionally: Praise feels better than criticism.
What we call rationality today, however, focuses exclusively on the kind of verbal formulations I mentioned above. This approach compares statements about reality with each other and ignores the kind of experiential logic we obtain from perceptions and emotions. In general, it labels personal experience as “too subjective” to be worth considering.
I’ve just described, from one point of view, three of the four “psychological types” defined by C.G. Jung: the sensing, feeling and thinking types. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory will have some familiarity with these notions: Some people approach the world primarily through their senses, some through their emotions and some through their verbalized thinking processes.
Anyone who has studied the Jungian types or the Myers-Briggs typology derived from Jung will understand that differences of type can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Most obviously in our society, people who overvalue verbalized logic tend to dismiss the “lower” kinds of thinking that are based on sensation or emotion. People who lead with their brains, so to speak, are frequently contemptuous of those who lead with their perceptions or emotions.
But those “intellectuals” are also the ones who are most likely to be surprised when, for example, their spouses desert them or their children hate them because of their emotional sterility, their lack of empathy, their insistence on principles over relationships, or just their lack of a sense of fun.
It’s the hegemony of the “thinking” type, of course, that has put our society in its present position where any plausible-sounding argument must be given consideration, no matter how wrong it feels on other levels.
Jung’s types, I think, correspond quite neatly with the ancient Greek – in particular the Platonist – understanding of the inner human being. Plato and his followers believed that we have an “irrational soul” – consisting of an “appetitive” (sense-desiring) and an “incensive” (emotionally motivating) part – and a “rational soul” focused on the logos. (The Greek word for the reasoning faculty was dianoia, literally “dual mind,” which highlights their understanding of the fundamentally dualistic nature of rationality.)
The fourth of Jung’s types is the “intuitive.” This is a word that is subject to serious misunderstandings, not least because there is a sort of industry that has cropped up in recent years that purports to teach people how to use their intuition. Jung defined intuition as the propensity to understand the wholeness of a situation all at once, without analysis. It’s not “gut feeling,” which is more like the sensing function, nor is it that vague stomach-turning feeling that if I do this, someone who’s important to me might disapprove; that’s emotion.
Intuition, rather, is Jung’s version of what the ancient philosophers called the nous, another untranslatable term. To the ancient philosophers, however, it’s clear that this was the “highest” part of the human being, the direct link to the divine. Unlike the “rational soul,” which must analyze things step-by-step and part-by-part, the nous grasps the whole as a whole, non-dualistically.
And this is the great error of rationalism: It ignores the importance or the meaning or even the existence of the wholeness of anything and everything. And by denying the validity of other kinds of understanding, it obstructs our wholeness as humans. A whole human being has access to all the resources of the soul and spirit, from sense-perception to emotional judgment to verbal analysis to that mysterious opening through which inexplicable insight flows. Closing off any of these ways of understanding reality is an act of self-amputation.
For most people, rationality is one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” concepts. It floats around in our world, we hear it in various contexts, and we form impressions of it based on how we hear it being used. But no one defines it when they use it, they just assume that everyone knows what they mean, and we who hear them likewise assume that we know what they mean.
When I started asking, “What is rationality?” and “What does it mean to be rational?” naturally the first place I looked was in dictionaries. What I found there was unhelpful. In the first instance, I was told that rationality is “reason” or “reasonableness,” and of course I quickly discovered that “reason” is rationality.
I also learned that both “reasonable” and “rational” are synonyms for “sane,” and obviously that “unreasonable” and “irrational” are synonyms for “insane.” This means the stakes in the game of deciding what’s rational and what isn’t are pretty high: If I can label you and/or your ideas “irrational,” I automatically win, and you go into a padded cell.
Since no one seemed to be interested in defining rationality in a clear and precise way, I turned to the etymology of the word to see if that would offer any clues. And not surprisingly, this led me straight back to ancient philosophy.
The word “rational” obviously derives from the Latin word ratio, originally meaning “reckoning” or “calculating” but also having the same meaning as the mathematical term “ratio,” which refers to a numerical relationship. A month is one-twelfth of a year, for example: 1/12.
The Latin word, in turn, was a translation of a Greek word, because it was the Greeks who first articulated these kinds of relationships. The word that the Greeks used to name a statement about this kind of mathematical relationship is a familiar one: logos.
Modern Christians are familiar with logos because of the famous prologue to the gospel of John. But the standard translation of logos as “word” overlooks the history and wide range of meanings of this multifarious word. At the time John’s gospel was written, logos had a 300-year or more history as a technical philosophical term. It meant, among other things, a saying or aphorism, an axiom, an account or explanation, and most importantly for our present topic, it meant “a proportion” – in other words, the same thing as ratio. And this is why the words “rational” and “logical” are essentially equivalent: because they both refer to proportionality.
Whether you say it in Latin, Greek or English, a ratio or a proportion is a comparison of or relationship between two things: between a month and a year, for example. And this is the root-concept of rationality: the comparison or relating of things to other things.
Under the influence of Aristotle, we have come to understand logic and rationality in terms of statements about reality. Indeed, a significant part of philosophy in the 20th century turned away from attempting to understand reality as such and focused instead on the structure and coherence of statements about reality. But if we look at the fundamental meaning of rationality and logic, we can see that these terms need not apply only to what we say about reality, to “well-formed formulas” about the universe.
On the contrary, any system of comparing and ranking things is, by definition, rational or logical. For example, we can judge our sensory experiences by how pleasant or unpleasant we find them: Getting laid is more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Or we can rate and rank experiences according to how they affect us emotionally: Praise feels better than criticism.
What we call rationality today, however, focuses exclusively on the kind of verbal formulations I mentioned above. This approach compares statements about reality with each other and ignores the kind of experiential logic we obtain from perceptions and emotions. In general, it labels personal experience as “too subjective” to be worth considering.
I’ve just described, from one point of view, three of the four “psychological types” defined by C.G. Jung: the sensing, feeling and thinking types. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory will have some familiarity with these notions: Some people approach the world primarily through their senses, some through their emotions and some through their verbalized thinking processes.
Anyone who has studied the Jungian types or the Myers-Briggs typology derived from Jung will understand that differences of type can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Most obviously in our society, people who overvalue verbalized logic tend to dismiss the “lower” kinds of thinking that are based on sensation or emotion. People who lead with their brains, so to speak, are frequently contemptuous of those who lead with their perceptions or emotions.
But those “intellectuals” are also the ones who are most likely to be surprised when, for example, their spouses desert them or their children hate them because of their emotional sterility, their lack of empathy, their insistence on principles over relationships, or just their lack of a sense of fun.
It’s the hegemony of the “thinking” type, of course, that has put our society in its present position where any plausible-sounding argument must be given consideration, no matter how wrong it feels on other levels.
Jung’s types, I think, correspond quite neatly with the ancient Greek – in particular the Platonist – understanding of the inner human being. Plato and his followers believed that we have an “irrational soul” – consisting of an “appetitive” (sense-desiring) and an “incensive” (emotionally motivating) part – and a “rational soul” focused on the logos. (The Greek word for the reasoning faculty was dianoia, literally “dual mind,” which highlights their understanding of the fundamentally dualistic nature of rationality.)
The fourth of Jung’s types is the “intuitive.” This is a word that is subject to serious misunderstandings, not least because there is a sort of industry that has cropped up in recent years that purports to teach people how to use their intuition. Jung defined intuition as the propensity to understand the wholeness of a situation all at once, without analysis. It’s not “gut feeling,” which is more like the sensing function, nor is it that vague stomach-turning feeling that if I do this, someone who’s important to me might disapprove; that’s emotion.
Intuition, rather, is Jung’s version of what the ancient philosophers called the nous, another untranslatable term. To the ancient philosophers, however, it’s clear that this was the “highest” part of the human being, the direct link to the divine. Unlike the “rational soul,” which must analyze things step-by-step and part-by-part, the nous grasps the whole as a whole, non-dualistically.
And this is the great error of rationalism: It ignores the importance or the meaning or even the existence of the wholeness of anything and everything. And by denying the validity of other kinds of understanding, it obstructs our wholeness as humans. A whole human being has access to all the resources of the soul and spirit, from sense-perception to emotional judgment to verbal analysis to that mysterious opening through which inexplicable insight flows. Closing off any of these ways of understanding reality is an act of self-amputation.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Name-Calling
Are you rational? Am I? Is anyone? Have you made judgments about who or what in our society represents rationality or its opposite?
These are important questions because of the high value we place on rationality in modern society. Indeed, if we can label something as “irrational,” we end the discussion: If you’re irrational, or what you believe is irrational, I can safely disregard anything you say; I don’t have to make any further argument.
This attitude reflects what I’ve referred to as “hyper-rationalism,” by which I mean the belief that the only way to understand anything in an accurate way is by means of rationality, whatever that is. It’s an attitude that has been with us for a fairly long time now, arising in the late 17th century and really gaining the upper hand in the 18th – the so-called “Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason.”
Those names reflect the widespread self-understanding of the noted thinkers of those times, their belief that they had advanced immeasurably from their predecessors of only a few years before: the religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” who had made the Reformation such a vicious, bloody mess. (The novel Q by “Luther Blissett” conveys a vivid impression of the violent craziness of the period, despite having been written by a committee.)
But in more recent times, we’ve seen how the application of an insistent rationalism can produce results that are equally or even more catastrophic; for example, in the Soviet Union, or in the whoring of science in general to political (think atom bomb) or economic (think psychological pharmaceuticals) purposes and interests.
We continue, however, to regard rationality as the supreme standard for judging ideas, worldviews, lifestyles; everything, in fact. I’m not convinced we really believe in it at this point, but we’ve found it useful for a long time as a justification for imperialism, both domestic and foreign, so it’s a bit hard to let it go.
What I mean by that is the claim that northern Europeans and their descendants in North America are the most rational people on Earth (which is justified ipso facto by the fact that we’ve succeeded in gaining control over almost everyone else), while all those other, darker-skinned or intellectually pre-modern (i.e., religious) people are “emotional” or “politically volatile” or just plain “backward,” so it’s incumbent upon us to guide them toward a better understanding of reality, a better approach to politics, and of course to a more efficient and remunerative exploitation of the natural resources buried under their feet.
This is precisely the attitude that led to the United States’ policies of “gunboat diplomacy” and support for “banana republics” (Latin American nations that were bribed and/or threatened into becoming nothing more than plantations for gringo landlords). We told ourselves that “those people” were incapable of creating stable societies and governments for themselves, so they needed our help; but our “help” consisted of making sure they never created stable societies or governments for themselves, because then they might be able to enforce demands for realistically adequate compensation for the labor and resources we were exploiting.
The same sort of thing has gone on in other parts of the world, of course; for example, the Middle East, where American and British oil companies (including one called British Petroleum) were interfering (and browbeating their own governments into interfering) with the political process in such countries as Iran and Iraq. The average American may not recognize the name Mossadegh any more than Allende, but the people of Iran and Chile haven’t forgotten.
So now we hear Americans asking, “Why do they hate us?” And the answer we get from the mainstream media and the corporate-owned talking heads who pose as experts, is simply, “Because they are irrational, backward people.” When in fact a rational examination of the past behavior of the United States and the United Kingdom is certainly likely to provoke distrust at the very least.
I’m quite fed up, frankly, with the tossing around of “rational” and “irrational” as labels, without deeper examination of such claims. Beyond international politics, the “clash of civilizations,” it’s also a factor in the so-called “culture wars” within the U.S.: “New Atheists” such as Dawkins and Hitchens happily hurl the “irrational” label at all religious believers willy-nilly, in the same way political and economic hegemonists use it to label the countries they want to dominate.
There are two angles of attack against this (mis)use of the idea of rationality. One is of course to argue the specifics, i.e., that the particular idea(s) or people labeled as rational or irrational are inaccurately so labeled. The other is to argue that rationality/irrationality as a concept is wrong, or at least so seriously misunderstood as to be useless. If the latter view is correct, it presumably makes it likelier that the former criticism will also be true.
It probably will come as no surprise that I believe the latter view is indeed correct. I’m convinced that almost no one who upholds rationality as the sine qua non of belief, thought, behavior, has any clear idea of what rationality really is. So what is it?
These are important questions because of the high value we place on rationality in modern society. Indeed, if we can label something as “irrational,” we end the discussion: If you’re irrational, or what you believe is irrational, I can safely disregard anything you say; I don’t have to make any further argument.
This attitude reflects what I’ve referred to as “hyper-rationalism,” by which I mean the belief that the only way to understand anything in an accurate way is by means of rationality, whatever that is. It’s an attitude that has been with us for a fairly long time now, arising in the late 17th century and really gaining the upper hand in the 18th – the so-called “Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason.”
Those names reflect the widespread self-understanding of the noted thinkers of those times, their belief that they had advanced immeasurably from their predecessors of only a few years before: the religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” who had made the Reformation such a vicious, bloody mess. (The novel Q by “Luther Blissett” conveys a vivid impression of the violent craziness of the period, despite having been written by a committee.)
But in more recent times, we’ve seen how the application of an insistent rationalism can produce results that are equally or even more catastrophic; for example, in the Soviet Union, or in the whoring of science in general to political (think atom bomb) or economic (think psychological pharmaceuticals) purposes and interests.
We continue, however, to regard rationality as the supreme standard for judging ideas, worldviews, lifestyles; everything, in fact. I’m not convinced we really believe in it at this point, but we’ve found it useful for a long time as a justification for imperialism, both domestic and foreign, so it’s a bit hard to let it go.
What I mean by that is the claim that northern Europeans and their descendants in North America are the most rational people on Earth (which is justified ipso facto by the fact that we’ve succeeded in gaining control over almost everyone else), while all those other, darker-skinned or intellectually pre-modern (i.e., religious) people are “emotional” or “politically volatile” or just plain “backward,” so it’s incumbent upon us to guide them toward a better understanding of reality, a better approach to politics, and of course to a more efficient and remunerative exploitation of the natural resources buried under their feet.
This is precisely the attitude that led to the United States’ policies of “gunboat diplomacy” and support for “banana republics” (Latin American nations that were bribed and/or threatened into becoming nothing more than plantations for gringo landlords). We told ourselves that “those people” were incapable of creating stable societies and governments for themselves, so they needed our help; but our “help” consisted of making sure they never created stable societies or governments for themselves, because then they might be able to enforce demands for realistically adequate compensation for the labor and resources we were exploiting.
The same sort of thing has gone on in other parts of the world, of course; for example, the Middle East, where American and British oil companies (including one called British Petroleum) were interfering (and browbeating their own governments into interfering) with the political process in such countries as Iran and Iraq. The average American may not recognize the name Mossadegh any more than Allende, but the people of Iran and Chile haven’t forgotten.
So now we hear Americans asking, “Why do they hate us?” And the answer we get from the mainstream media and the corporate-owned talking heads who pose as experts, is simply, “Because they are irrational, backward people.” When in fact a rational examination of the past behavior of the United States and the United Kingdom is certainly likely to provoke distrust at the very least.
I’m quite fed up, frankly, with the tossing around of “rational” and “irrational” as labels, without deeper examination of such claims. Beyond international politics, the “clash of civilizations,” it’s also a factor in the so-called “culture wars” within the U.S.: “New Atheists” such as Dawkins and Hitchens happily hurl the “irrational” label at all religious believers willy-nilly, in the same way political and economic hegemonists use it to label the countries they want to dominate.
There are two angles of attack against this (mis)use of the idea of rationality. One is of course to argue the specifics, i.e., that the particular idea(s) or people labeled as rational or irrational are inaccurately so labeled. The other is to argue that rationality/irrationality as a concept is wrong, or at least so seriously misunderstood as to be useless. If the latter view is correct, it presumably makes it likelier that the former criticism will also be true.
It probably will come as no surprise that I believe the latter view is indeed correct. I’m convinced that almost no one who upholds rationality as the sine qua non of belief, thought, behavior, has any clear idea of what rationality really is. So what is it?
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