Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Monday, January 27, 2014

How does Pope Francis keep believing?

The world I will hand over to my grandson is measurably worse than the world I was given, in almost every sense imaginable. Like many other people of goodwill, I have fought the good fight and essentially lost. How does Jorge Bergoglio keep the faith?

I have no idea.

This is not a rant against others. I know my flaws all too well ("...I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me," says Psalm 51). Any dispassionate observer looking at my life would see someone born with more privilege than 4/5ths of humanity (this probably applies to most people in the United States) and all I managed to achieve is securing my own well-being and a college degree for my sons.

If I am honest, my life says I care about me and mine. Well, "mine" not so much at times.

Looking at my life I see that I have written about injustices for decades, done some volunteering here and there, made tax-deductible and non-deductible donations to "good" organizations and to people I have come across, voted responsibly and generally been an average middle class do-gooder. None of this has had much effect; granted these were not heroic nor large contributions.

Lest the reader think I don't know what I am talking about, consider that in the richest economy in the world, middle incomes have been in stagnation and decline since 1973, while productivity and profits have soared. Things have not been better elsewhere.

Consider how
  • "Second wave" feminism of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem ends up looking like a deliberate ruse by the plutocracy to double the supply of workers, thus driving wages down. 
  • The civil rights movement led to only token reforms and blacks never acceded in the right proportions to the social and economic well-being experienced by whites when Martin Luther King spoke of his famous dream. 
  • Those who took arms against injustice actually furthered the careers of many a Western intelligence and military man's career.
Moreover, to delve in Pope Francis' pond, didn't Soeur Sourire (the gentle nun who sang "Dominique-nique-nique" about St. Dominic to the sounds of her guitar) end up committing suicide at the end of a lesbian affair gone wrong? Weren't the clerics of the Vatican II era, conservative and liberal alike, consummate liars?

So, who's to say that the much ballyhooed victories of the Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 70s weren't merely mirages and the leaders mere stooges? Even polio is back, thanks to the Syrian civil war.

This is why I'm thinking that the Republican economic conservatives have a point. Life is nasty, brutish and short; the law of the jungle prevails and the real ethic to which everyone adheres is "me first."

In that state of things, why love your neighbor (other than carnally if it pleases you)? Why derive from such a principle a socioeconomic perspective that would in theory lead to a better life for all? Why not admit our fundamental selfishness and be done with it? Let the most selfish win.

Certainly, the tale about a Galilean woodworker 2,000 years ago is full of holes, as are the stories of Abraham and Moses. The religion of Mohammed has been so twisted and distorted into hate and war as to neutralize its genuinely peace-loving principles. Perhaps Buddha, who did not bother to start an actual religion, had a the right idea.

I suppose that's why I believe that the sun will "rise" tomorrow. Beyond that, I'm not so sure.

Friday, October 21, 2011

I seek to honor the inexpressible

Everyone who has heard of my change of mind concerning God is waiting to see what church I will start attending. Yet accepting the idea of God is not, in all honesty, identical to induction into religion.

If I take a step toward religion, it will likely involve the Christian metaphors and stories with which I am familiar. But it might not involve a new baptism, a being "born again."

After all, God is a vastly incomprehensible being who propelled into existence, and conceivably sustains, a universe about which we know barely a smidgen.

If neutrinos can indeed travel faster than light, as recent scientific news seemed to propose, then perhaps Einstein is wrong and physicists, the philosophers of our day, face searing soul-searching about the fundamentals of their field. We scarcely know anything is the genuine scientific outlook.

The adherents and professionals of religion make a crass error when they think they've got God in their pockets, just as atheists who rely on science err in proposing that we know enough to put God in the dustbin of history.

God is someone so outside our experience, so profoundly unobservable that all we are ever likely to know about her* is an intuition of a light that shines through many, many veils.

It's not like even Christians know God through Jesus.

The Galilean woodworker of the gospels was not recognizably divine to all and sundry when he walked the Earth like you and me. People were surprised when he performed wonders that we think humans cannot do. And who knows what Jesus was thinking 2,000 years ago, much less what he might be thinking now, if he is thinking at all?

In a similar vein, Islam and Judaism are attempts at approximation. Mohammed's angel and Moses' burning bush are at best literary images of inexpressible and intuitive experiences in these men's psyches. Not false images necessarily, but not likely what an empirically minded modern would accept as factual.

Christians may think Christianity is better than either one, but do Christians know definitively? No, faith is not knowledge.

This is why I was struck several days ago by words attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite: "With a wise silence we do honor to the inexpressible."


* I do not contend that God has a sex, for reasons best discussed elsewhere. To offset the use of capitalized masculine pronouns for God for the past 20,000 years or so, I propose to use uncapitalized feminine ones for the next 20,000 years or so, just for balance.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

2011: the year without heroes

Call me naïve, but for most of my life I have had heroes, seemingly immutable principles, beliefs and hopes and even faith. Each has peeled off me like the skins of an onion until coming to believe in nothing much, eschew hope, deem most principles self-serving and finding malleable clay at the feet of all my heroic statuary.

My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.

Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.

There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.

By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.

To say he has disappointed is an understatement.

We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Today Is as Good as It Gets

A diaphanously sunny day as seen from the cozy comfort indoors, today is actually cold and a wind slices through anyone out on the street. My mother would pretend the weather was a sudden break in a midsummer heatwave: cool air, at last! But that's still fighting it.

What if I became one with approaching winter, surrendering to its chill as a snowman might, with pleasure? What if I undertook to receive "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" -- which are, after all, merely random, irrational instruments designed to deliver pain -- and embrace them?

What if I accepted that I am small, that the forces of nature and fortune, that what sets in motion almost everything I face, pleasant or unpleasant, is beyond my control?

In truth, the past is gone, the future is not yet here. There is only today. There is only me with my limitations. All in all, today I suffer less than many, more than a few. Tomorrow, who knows? Yesterday, did all my troubles really seem so far away, or did I simply not know today?

I shall go out to meet the day that awaits me. It is the best today I shall ever have.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Hail the Universal Echo ... Echo ... Echo ...

Now that others have taken up my non-theistic ethics1, it seems possible to propose a replacement for the deity: the Universal Echo, or the foil somewhere out in the heavens for our projected hopes, aspirations, imagined superlatives and magical thinking, from which all religions and philosophical systems boomerang.

The idea is vaguely drawn on Feuerbach's idea that “The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man; the knowledge of God is the self-knowledge of man.”2 Put simply: God is our own projection, an imaginary friend, if you will.

God has uses. The God of conservatives validates “family values” and war. The God of liberals is herself a liberal, pacifist, blessed-are-the-poor kind of deity.

The Universal Echo is not another god, but a reasonable proposal of which science can probably find evidence. Listening to the Echo is us truly hearing ourselves. Sending thoughts to the Echo, an equivalent of prayer, is allowing our thoughts to go off into the ether, then bounce back from the cosmos and hit us as if new and improved.

In this proposal, I am not offering yet another anthropomorphic magical being. The UE is not someone separate from ourselves, but ourselves extended and truly mirrored back. Visually, we could speak of the Universal Reflection. In sound, we could speak of the Universal Wave. Sensorily, we could speak of the Universal Touch.

We think, speak, look, reach out and come across a universe that bounces back our thoughts, sounds, our search light receptors and our fingers.

Traditionally, religion says that God created the world. We would say that in discovering our boundaries against which all our impulses bounce back to us, our Echo has created a sensory world seemingly out of nothing.

Indeed, we first became human when we became self-aware.


Notes
1. Morals Without God, The New York Times
2. Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Facts to What Truth?

Comments concerning my post From Facts to Truth, both public and private, suggest that there's some anxiety out there concerning the starting point and the destination in the heading of my original essay.

Some people seem to feel I have become an idolater of facts, when in reality I merely see facts as useful in discussions in which meaning hinges on them.

Others feel that I already abandoned truth by when I allegedly threw "Him" out, Christological insinuation heard. The capital-T truth that was prevalent in Western societies (America and Europe) hinged on a "Him" tossed out centuries ago by Christians themselves. Not me.

Finally, a third current of comment proposes a more intriguing question: to what truth is the Zeitgeist shifting all our facts and factoids?

Short answer: I have no idea.

Actually, I have a pretty good idea that it's not to a restoration of past theologies nor to capital-T truth. We've done that, been there and can still smell the charred human remains.

Instead, I'd suggest that once facts undergo sufficient criticism, we'll drift to some version of what used to be called "common sense," when Western commonality was white, male-dominated and Christian. Only that commonality is not coming back, thank the Echo.

I'd look for a future in which we take on the larger goals and ends: an active mind, rather than computation of two-digit whole numbers by the second quarter of fifth grade; shared prosperity, rather than a minimum $10 an hour wage.

Nothing wrong with granulated, fine-tuned goals, per se. Yet, can we deal with a whole society of 300 million diverse individuals through cookie-cutter "fact-based" solutions?

Or can we perhaps leave the details to the people who actually have to strive for the goals, relying on their uncommon sense, their gut feel for what works, their home truths?

Saturday, May 22, 2010

From Facts to Truth

The Zeitgeist is changing! the Zeitgeist is changing! You heard of its first glimmer here.

For more than 200 years North American culture (you too, Canadians, thanks to David Hume) was a beacon of ... (wait for it) ... facts. We've loved empirically quantifiable and observable reality, from RBIs to GDPs, from the census to tallies of the most Valentine cards received.

Our policymakers talk about facts that can be pressed to serve any party, any master, any point of view. None care that the unemployment rate is a ratio so approximate that it misses changes involving as many as 260,000 U.S. workers.

Taught that foundational philosophy is the mother of all scientia (Latin for knowledge), I've run for decades against the stubbornly empiricist Zeitgeist (German Zeit, time, and Geist, spirit, meaning "the spirit of the age"), even though my occupation worships it.

Truth came in observable and measurable bites; reason was king. Gods, witches, intuitions and feelings were for hippies, existentialists and (of course!) women. Damn the yang, up with the ying!

That's all about to change.

A growing panel of hostile inquisitors is asking why we can invent the Internet but still can't get Johnny to read, Janey out of the slum, let alone protect either from the bad guys? Something is wrong with the tyranny of facts.

We forgot about truth, the elusive heart's desire of Aristotle, Spinoza, Maritain and others. The bureaucrats and policymakers may not realize it, the better newspapers are just beginning to sniff it, but I've known it was coming (now you do); indeed, it's long overdue.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Beyond Forgiveness

It's a pleasant surprise in middle age when you run across something you have never heard before, something that stops you dead in your tracks to make you ponder. This happened to me with this ethical counsel:
Be like night when covering the faults of others.
We are asked not merely to forgive, but essentially to forget. When we see or suffer someone else's wrongdoing, not only must we avoid calling attention to the wrongdoer, or seeking revenge or justice for the wrong. This encomium advises us to conceal the wrong and spare the other person embarrassment or penalty.

This is obviously way beyond Christian forbearance. Way beyond our Western sense of tit for tat, dressed up in fancy legal codes.

The source is one of seven counsels attributed to a famous Muslim poet and mystic Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273), known to most of us in the West simply as Rumi, a saintly jurist and theologian who wrote in Persian and lived in what today are Afghanistan and Turkey.

Everybody claims Rumi as his own; and, yes, possibly Virginia Woolf, too.

The Sufis and the Shia and Sunni Muslims have regarded him as their own. Because he wrote in Persian, a variety of nations today claim him as theirs, as does Turkey. Even many Americans -- except me, of course -- have long regarded him as a favorite poet.

Yet, of course, although his poetry and sayings are quite ecumenical, he made plain that he believed in Islam. Indeed, this teaching goes back to a hadith* (verse) in the Quran that goes something like this:
Allah will cover up on the Day of Resurrection the faults of the one who covers up the faults of the others in this world.
This comes reasonably close to the reciprocity asserted in the Christian Lord's Prayer: forgive us our sins as we forgive others. Yet again, there seems to be a crucial difference between the Islamic idea and the Christian.

In Islam, it seems to me, an admitted non-Muslim ignoramus, the deity isn't even seeing the faults. There's some sense in which the moral defects of a person are treated almost as if they were private parts, to be covered by a robe of sorts.

Don't let other people's moral warts show and no one will look at yours. This is not merely the Christian "do not judge lest ye be judged." The whole idea of judgment is skipped over and replaced with a moral imperative to allow everyone to save face ethically.

Note also the quiet ease in which Rumi puts us while thrusting upon us a moral norm that is momentous and, insofar as I can see, runs against the grain of our Western common sense, at least. "Be like night ..." Make sure no one knows that there ever was anything deserving forgiveness!

So, now, for your enjoyment, the Seven Counsels* of Rumi:
Be like a river in generosity and giving help
Be like a sun in tenderness and pity
Be like night when covering others' faults
Be like a dead when furious and angry
Be like earth in modesty and humbleness
Be like a sea in tolerance
Be as you are or as you look like
And relax. I haven't converted to Islam.


* I do not claim to have translated these. I cannot seem to find the exact bibliographical information to identify the Quranic verse or the precise source of the "seven advices" [sic] widely attributed to Rumi. I will properly source them if someone has such information.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Values vs. Interests

Dinner with a friend occasionally allows one to plunge into the foundational philosophical issues, disregarding the day's din. In this case, it was the longstanding discussion between materialism and metaphysics -- although he protested that it was not. The crucible in which these views were tested was the basis for human conduct, social convention, law.

My friend held to the traditional, majoritarian view that humans respond to certain essential values that they develop or absorb from childhood on. In other words, we have a nonmaterial, psychological machine, so to speak, that processes certain thoughts and yields certain abstractions called ideas -- in this case they are ideas about what ought to be done.

The ancient Hebrews asked for a king anointed by God and the Romans claimed the Emperor was divine, hence ordained to rule.

Bossuet, court clergyman to Louis XIV, christianized the idea with his theory of the divine right of kings. This echoed Charlemagne's own ecclesiastical scholar court jester, Alcuin of York, who argued that "the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."

Alcuin, I'd guess, would have seen his opinion confirmed in this summer's town halls.

It took 13 centuries for a very chastened Christianity, in the voices of Jacques Maritain and the postwar Christian Democratic parties of western Europe, to adopt democracy, under the motto vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). Too late; that was two centuries after the seizure of the Bastille.

Not only has power traditionally been seen as flowing from godhead to crown and scepter, but also to all morals, laws, socially sanctioned customs and so forth. Or, among philosophers in a theist ocean, ideas spring from the psyche and its archetypes, whence spring philosophies, legal systems and the ordering of what Hegel called "civil society."

Karl Marx was not the first one to dethrone this idea, but he was among the most articulate of early, rationalist critics. In a view he summarized in the much-debated 1858 Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he wrote:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
These words, which essentially state that the struggle for survival is the basis for everything deemed holy and sacrosanct, or at least, legal and enshrined by custom, struck me like lightening when I belatedly first came across them, while working, oddity of oddities, for the U.S. Catholic bishops, several decades ago. Until then, I had been a modern Thomist.

I never came to embrace the mechanistic view of historical materialism as expressed by the Leninist parties, but I will freely admit that my more recent, post-Christian ethic of survival bears some debt to old Karli.

The fundamental human striving is to survive. As a friend undergoing cancer treatment reminded me recently, we live pretty much like the man who, having flung himself from the top of a tower of Notre Dame, thinks to himself as he falls, "I hope this lasts a while."

To my mind, having rejected the existence of a soul, the metaphysical or spiritual world, all of which puts the existence of any god into serious doubt, it no longer seems plausible that a reality other than the material actually exists.

We have material interests, sure. We canonize these interests in our customs, our laws, even our religions and philosophies. But we do not have values founded in any "higher," nonmaterial source, simply because such a source does not exist.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

The Freedom Delusion

Today is Argentina's Independence Day. On July 9, 1816, delegates from the United Provinces of the South, voted to sever political ties with the Spanish monarch. It's an odd holiday because the event was almost an afterthought: the revolt against Spanish rule began on May 25, 1810, all of which reminds me, even more oddly, of a story about Ghana's independence.

First, a little context.

For six long years Gen. José de San Martín kept demanding that the congress of provincial delegates -- similar to the U.S. Continental Congress -- declare a rupture. In 1810, news had arrived of Napoleon having marched into Spain and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII. The locals, lacking an army, deposed the viceroy and seized power in name of the imprisoned monarch.

This was a legal technicality, built on the colonial legal technicality that the territories in the American continent belonged not to Spain, but to the Spanish crown, technically equal in sovereignty to Spain. (I believe Britain held to a similar conceit as a way to deprive its colonies of a seat in Parliament.)

By 1816, with Napoleon long gone, San Martín was growing tired of the charade of claiming allegiance to the same monarch as the Spanish troops with whom he did battle.

Independence and freedom were never the same thing, as the slaves of all the colonies well knew.

Indeed, the notion was put most succinctly by a classmate of mine -- Monica G. -- in a university short story seminar in Montreal. She had written a short story set in her native Ghana. (Imagine how hard it must have been for a citizen of an African country so near the Equator to weather the blizzards of Canada!)

The protagonist was a poor old woman going home from work as a domestic on the eve of Ghana's independence. I forget what happened in the story, but I recall one of the woman's hopes for the great event of which everybody talked.

Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.

We have all shared in the disappointment of realizing that the realization of our highest, fondest and noblest hopes never quite turns out as we imagined, if it ever does. Our ideals, like our lives, turn to dust, like the soil of Ghana's deforested savannah.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Why do the heathen rage?

Taking a leaf from Chani's Sacred Life Sunday series, our text this morning is Psalm 2:1. In the words of the King James translation, it runs "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"

There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.

Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.

O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."
The thought came to me when Dubya could come to power unelected, order wiretapping on Americans, out his own country's intelligence officer and imprison people indefinitely without trial, all in defiance of his oath of office to the Constitution ... all with utter impunity.

Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.

Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.

To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.

We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.

The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.  Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.  Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
The Psalms have this thing with a king who will reign forever and "smite" anyone who even looked at us the wrong way. So? I want my smiting done right now!

Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.

Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?

How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?

Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.

Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following
But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.
Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine ears ...
This reminds me of a T-shirt I bought one summer at Rehoboth Beach. On a black background it features a silver skull engulfed in golden flames. Over the years I came to call this image the picture of my inner, raging daemon.

It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.

There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.

That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Biochemical Soul

When I was a child I used to wish I had been born in ancient Greece, so my ideas would be new. Every time I made some novel observation, Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates had been there.

This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.

A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.

I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).

Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.

Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.

So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.

The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.

Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.

And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?

Friday, April 03, 2009

Getting No Better Than Anyone Else

One of my favorite Beatles songs was always "Getting Better All the Time." You remember the song? No? Well here are my favorite verses:
I've got to admit it's getting better, better
A little better all the time, it can't get no worse
I have to admit it's getting better, better
It's getting better since you've been mine

Me used to be angry young man
Me hiding me head in the sand
You gave me the word, I finally heard
I'm doing the best that I can
Let me do a little twist on that.

In the manner of Dante, I spent years consigning my deceased father to the deepest circles of hell for having abandoning my mother and me when I was a child. In the end, although I haven't copied the history and I am a distinct person, I realize I'm not much better than my father.

And that's what I really call getting better.

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Thinking from the Gut

In the plethora of responses, on-blog and off, concerning Israel and Gaza, I keep coming across instances of visceral, rather than cerebral, thinking. To some people, anything having to do with that troubled area of the world is so tied up with who they are that anything "their side" does must necessarily be defended and anything the "other side" does must be attacked.

Bystanders who are neither Arab nor Jewish are regarded as either neo-Nazis or neo-colonialists if they dare question the moral and political infallibility of either the government of Israel or the various movements and governments of the Arab world. Yet -- in actual fact -- the Israeli government, as well as Hamas and the many others on the other side, are both composed of quite fallible human beings.

As a Gentile in the West, I am most exposed to Jews who take personal offense at any criticism of Israel. (I am sure, and in different occasions I have experienced it, pro-Palestinian Arabs can be just as obdurate.)

Yet I am an American who criticizes the U.S. government often and hard, a former Catholic who has put the Catholic philosophical system through the shredder and excoriated the leadership of the Catholic Church, a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are ineffectual wimps, a man who believes in the rights of women and the wrongs of many men, including myself, and so forth.

We will never make progress as human beings until we can all step back and look at our own pet ideas, nations, cultures or groups with detachment. At least when we engage in discourse.

Monday, January 05, 2009

On Equality

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts prompted by a discussion I've been having on the subject of equality. Defining equality, its source, whether it is desirable or achievable is a little harder at first blush than it might seem.

There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.

Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.

Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.

We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.

It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."

We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?

In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?

Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?

Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?

Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.

Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Why Conservatism Was Always Doomed

In the future, when Dubya is known as the Hoover of the 21st century, it will seem obvious: the wave of conservatism from Reagan to the second Bush was sheer folly. What may not seem as obvious is the philosophical truth that all conservatism is always untenable.

The human impulse to conserve arises primarily out of illusion. We imagine that something we know or believe is either worthy of preserving or will actually last forever.

Yet if we know only one thing it's that the central characteristic of reality is change -- growth, decay and renewal, over and over and over again.

In a wide-ranging discussion of his philosophical worldview, education innovator A. S. Neill once confessed his profound doubt concerning God. People point to Christianity's two millenia, he argued, yet the cult of Isis lasted longer and where are her followers today?

Where is Rome, Athens and Sparta, the Persian Empire, the Ming dynastry?

Indeed, where are the absolute monarchs? Montesquieu, who lived under the last of them in France, was a precursor of the French Revolution and the ideas behind American independence.

He compared monarchy to a galleon capable of sailing the seven seas yet vulnerable to sinking like a rock if hit by a single well-placed cannonball. Democracy, Montesquieu also wrote, is more like a raft in rapids: it sometimes gets flipped over yet ultimately always floats, seeking equilibrium ... like reality itself, I would add.

Perennially seeking equilibrium in which to float, however, is not the same as achieving it. That ideal floating equilibrium is elusive precisely because it is ideal -- it is an abstraction, what could or might be, but not what is.

But surely some things must be there at the eternal point of equilibrium, you say?

Moral principles are eternal and universal, some argue. I believe that our desire to survive creates moral imperatives, but these differ markedly from the ethics of most religions.

Also, our survival, individual or as a species, is not a sure thing by a long shot. Not eternal. We're really johnny-come-latelies in our planet. Current science places our collective origin some 200,000 years ago in Africa. Contrast this with our planet's 4.5 billion years.

If you wanted to pay the Earth and humans $1 per 100,000 years of existence, the Earth would get $4.5 million and humans just $2.00. A mansion versus a fancy cup of latte.

Has the temporal insignificance of everything we hold dear dawned yet?

In such a state of reality, the only sane public policy, the only survival approach to life, is to adapt to change. To conserve is not merely foolish, it is a falsehood. Nothing is conserved, nothing stays the same.

Even change is almost never absolute and irreversible. Until it is. Mark Twain put it another way: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Moreover, modern conservatism, political or religious, isn't really that conservative.

In the 1950s the Republicans demonized Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson because, among other things, he was divorced. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the "moral majority" adored divorced, lapsed Catholic Ronald Reagan.

Funny how those immutable morals changed, even among the most rabidly fundamentalist Protestants in the country.

For the most part, neo-conservatives want to preserve a past that never existed.

It's a Disneyfied 1908, when everyone was white and polite and Christian. Men with handlebar moustaches concerned themselves with important matters such as business and machines, while women read poetry at their sewing circles.

Conservatism is about the illusion that time and life can be somehow jarred and pickled, or made into a never rancid jam. It's an idea that is doomed from the moment it is spoken.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

A Christian Ecology

In the end, if the teachings of the Christian gospels were fully lived out, history would be replaced by a life of universal Zen-like, other-directed detachment. Humanity would be kind, simple, chaste and ultimately extinct, like the Shakers.
'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
                                                               (Shaker hymn)
Then war and misery and pollution would cease. Species of plants and animals would retake the space we once occupied. The world might then be a place of natural entropy.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The Human Loneliness

When Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, settled on a title for her autobiography, it was "The Long Loneliness," in part a reference to the lover she lost for her faith, in part a reflection on the human condition. We all endure the long loneliness.

This came to me last weekend when the company of a special friend was denied me and I realized that I do not have many friends at all, despite living in the same city now for roughly 30 years.

Speaking with friends and mulling this over, I also realize that part of the reason is that I am overly critical. The vast majority of people are tedious: they talk about themselves, their possessions, their trips, their lifestyle and their work.

The friends one knew in college, those with whom one could talk about politics and philosophy until the wee hours while nursing beers warm, they are all gone. Maybe they never existed.

Deep in the human heart there is instead a gaping gnawing, living hole. A black hole that tells us that, in the end, we're all on our own.

Friends will call you when they want something, want to tell you something. We know that humanity is essentially self-interested.

Lovers may assuage the loneliness, but they will never fill it. I have a broken marriage as witness.

In the absence of a God, there is nothing to fill that void that is felt most acutely when we are alone and in need. As in the story of Jesus, we will all know the experience of being deserted by everyone.

The human loneliness explains a multitude of endeavors -- religion, love, literature and art, the search of riches and power and sex -- yet none of them ever overcome that sense of living without rhyme or reason, loveless, artless, without any real wealth or security in the end, questionably or temporarily attractive, in a word, alone.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Save Our Souls

The soul, known in antiquity as anima (Latin) or psyche (Greek), is an imaginary abstraction meant to enfold all that the ancients did not know about human behavior and the psychosomatic functioning of the body. The international nautical distress call, SOS (Save Our Souls), is a modern figurative expression of traditional thinking on something that does not exist.

This, I have realized, is much more important and far easier to demonstrate, than whether there is a god.

While I do not know the science in any technical sense, I have had enough experience with pharmaceutical end-products to convince me that everything I have always thought as uniquely individual and metaphysical within me simply does not exist. I am merely an animated biochemical object that has developed certain properties, such as speech and "thinking," as a result of evolutionary pressures and random happenstance.

That human beings cannot replicate me, cannot fully control the psyche -- indeed, cannot offer me or anyone else the definitive psychological silver bullet in a pill -- is merely a reflection of the limitations, imperfections and underdevelopment of human properties.

The soul does not exist.

Everything you and I feel is, the ancient Greeks put it, a "state of the liver." Everything you and I want and desire is the result of a mixture of genetic coding and social influences.

All thought, all religion, all philosophy, even this blog, amounts to nothing more than the output of a complex biochemical mechanism we do not yet fully understand, but we are learning to influence biochemically.

The will is not free, it is a set of impulses directed by the double influence of nature and nurture. I have wasted my time with ethics: at the core, we are not moral agents.

The soul does not exist.

The music we like and the films we enjoy, the prayers we have uttered with fervor, the love we have soaked in and the utter, weightless, immaterial happiness we have experienced from time to time, all these are mirages, shadows in the cave. Nonexistent.

Of course, the same is true of our dislikes and fears and even loathing. One day there will be a pill to cure them. One day there will be a pill to make us all behave in a way that is best for us collectively -- at least according to those who have power.

The soul does not exist.

We have no need to save what doesn't exist. We will cease to exist, to have consciousness once our animating biochemical processes -- longhand for "life" -- grind to a halt.

Once you begin to look at the world from this perspective, the inanities and stupidities, the sheer greed and cruelty and selfishness of human beings, their destructiveness of everything around them, especially our own kind, makes eminent sense.

We are little different from dogs and cats. In reality. We are not intelligent and feeling and potentially moral. We are merely sentient in a somewhat more complex way.

The soul, if you insist, is merely a convention, a way of talking about seemingly ineffable things that appear to move us and within us, things that are really atoms and protons mating with one another.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Deserve?

In a random remark at a recent dinner, one person was being offered support for deciding not to work for a while with the justification that "you deserve time off." Ever since McDonald's told us via Barry Manilow, that "you deserve a break today," the American penchant for claiming right to care for No. 1 has taken off. But is it justified?

To deserve is to be worthy of, qualified for, or have a claim to a reward or punishment. Most of us eagerly claim rewards and just as enthusiastically decline punishment. What do we really deserve?

We cannot claim very much of who or what we are as our own individual merit. We did not choose, despite the pseudopatriots who are "proud to be American," to be born in the United States. We did not elect to be born to households with running water and electricity, a given educational and income level.

Much of who we are or have become is an accident of birth.

Then there's luck. Happening on an idea when a society was ready for it -- or not. Imagine being Nelson Mandela in 1964 and having the idea that apartheid should end. Yes, in the end (in the 1990s) he triumphed. But he could be forgiven for wondering where he had gone wrong as he languished in his prison cell in the interim. So should we ponder where luck has helped or hindered.

Finally, there is the matter of free will. Are we really free, or are we a mass of socially and genetically determined impulses that predictably propel us down a course marked for us before we were born?

Sure, as humans we claim "inalienable rights," meaning that our fellows may not deprive us of a fair share of resources and social "bandwidth." Yet, how do we really know that humans are inherently endowed with such rights and not, say, cats or bees or rocks?

In the end, it is very difficult to claim we deserve anything, good or bad.