SubscribeApril 11th, 2012
Requiem
Pain and solace.
I’m here in this public place, with coffee and my computer listening to Mozart’s Requiem. On pain-days, like this, I often listen to it and surf. Usually there’s something appropriate, but today .. heh .. I jumped into the data stream and came up with Bryan Fischer and Fr. Flannery. Neither man I knew.
Start with Fischer. What a dweeb! He doesn’t believe in evolution because of the first law of thermodynamics. Cackle. Apparently he has a degree in philosophy__he slept through critical thinking? If you’re interested, there are vids of him speaking up on youtube. Do read the comments, some of them are funny. In my current pain-sad place, his absurdity is a bit like prozac. I do wonder though, if the Fischer’s of the world exemplify who we are as an “evolved” species. Really, there is Mozart and there is Fischer. It makes me wonder if we aren’t speciating and we haven’t noticed that some of us have a dwindling braincase.
Then there’s the Vatican “silencing” Father Flannery and the ACP’s response.
The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) is disturbed that Fr Tony Flannery, a founding member of the Association, is being ‘silenced’. We believe that such an approach, in its individual focus on Fr Flannery and inevitably by implication on the members of the Association, is an extremely ill-advised intervention in the present pastoral context in Ireland.
OK, but you know Flannery is only silenced if he obeys. No one sewed his mouth shut. And to call this response to Ratzinger a “Catholic Spring”? I wonder if Mozart would have obeyed if he had been ordered silent because Count Franz didn’t like his particular interpretation of the grief due the Countess. Well I suppose Mozart did die in the musical attempt, but I don’t know, I can’t see him shutting up any other way.
And you know if the fathers really want to stand on “questions about due process and freedom of conscience” then perhaps they should consider starting their own church or — maybe — consider a secular, moral life instead of the not-so-moral Catholic one. (Hypocrisy is deeply immoral you know. Then there’s that other thing the Church has been supporting.)
Same goes for those good-folk who don’t fill the pews on Sundays but still consider themselves Catholic. Yes, I know there are good people who are also Catholic. I know some of them. But what? That excuses taking part in an organization that is so deeply, and clearly evil?
Gawd, what absurdity. In the face of the devastation of our shared world, Fischer “thinks” his way into an absurdist docu-drama and Flannery can’t figure out that he isn’t silenced at all?
And we? How many of us follow them in the death of reason?
I’m going to go watch the parrot sketch. I need something sensible.
March 8th, 2012
why ask me about god?
Recently someone asked me why atheists couldn’t just let religion alone. To be honest I felt a bit like I’d been asked why the other kids on the playground couldn’t just leave the querent alone to play with his truck. I suppose it was the distinct whining quality to the question that did it.
My first verbal response was to say I could no more speak for all atheists than he could speak for all men. All I could do, I told him, was talk about why I spoke about religion, or about experience as a non-supernatural thing, when and how I did.
First, I asked him why he felt it necessary to broach religion with a person he knew was an atheist because left alone, I’d never talk to him about it.
The question of conversion is a bust. He knows that since he has tried to “offer me the comfort of Jesus” in the past.
He didn’t really have an answer for me, but based on the conversation that followed, it seemed that he thinks of me as a coherent thinker, and he really did want to understand what atheists have against religion.
That’s just so funny. The fact that he comes to me because I am a coherent thinker and he can’t seem to understand that the incoherence of religion is the reason I don’t take solace in “Jesus”__gawd, hilarious.
A bit like “‘arguing” for the literal truth of the Bible by use of empirical evidence. About as incoherent as one can get.
One of the things I told him was that I never approached those that believe in some form of the supernatural to speak about religion. So, I told him, I suspect that if many atheists were left alone to dwell in the secular world and allowed to make use of empirical evidence to run their societies, I suspect he’d never have to discuss religious incoherence ever again. That is, I said, you approached me not the other way around.
I try rather hard to avoid such conversations because they are almost never really desired – conversations that is. What is often wanted is some form of acceptance, or reassurance. Reason must be its own source of reassurance; one cannot argue one’s way to emotional stability. In other words, you either take empirical evidence as the basic tool of human life or you don’t. In the case of someone who makes decisions based on story, or faith or some other non-empirical structure, no amount of empirical evidence is going effect the system. Not to say the system can’t be effected, of course change is possible. There are plenty of people who give up the supernatural. The question is what causes that shift? I don’t think it’s empirical evidence. It might be the story the evidence makes, but I doubt it is the evidence itself.
Still, if this man wants to live by faith as his primary decision-making rubric, OK. I don’t care. The problem arises when that is not enough for him. Why come to me? Why?
I’ve questioned it in my self, since he doesn’t have an answer when I ask him. There is the hilarity of my “clear” mind, but I think he comes to me because he is not reassured by his own faith. There’s something missing for him. Which leads me to believe it isn’t doing the job emotionally.
Why I wonder?
I’ve heard a good deal about the difficulties of faith, about living with doubt. I wonder at that because I don’t have to do that with empirical evidence. I can know that some “fact” may be wrong, that what we count as knowledge will change over time, but I never have to question evidence itself. I can stand on the ground (to put this in earthly terms) and know that what I understand the ground to be will change as I discover more in geology and chemistry, but I don’t ever have to seriously question whether there is ground under my feet. That, my friend is comforting in a way, apparently, your faith never achieves.
To go back to the little truck…there could be any number of reasons why the other “kids” won’t let you alone to play with your “truck”. One might me that it is the only truck and there are dozens of kids who want to play. One might be that it isn’t your truck. One might be that flattening it with big rocks isn’t really playing. There are others.
March 6th, 2012
speaking about gleaning sense from silliness…
Have you seen this article over at Brain Pickings?
How to glean secular models for engagement and inspiration from religious rituals.
Hmmm. Interesting.
August 8th, 2011
do you find irrationality upsetting? Charles Taylor
It’s been a difficult few days. I’m discombobulated. (Love that word if not the feeling.) What has me so confused and unsettled? Partly it’s the American debt crisis and the ongoing financial melt down, partly it’s what precipitated it, but mostly it’s the general ineffectiveness of reason in the world.
So much of what I’ve been reading and thinking about these last weeks involves these odd irrational slides into snarly meanness. Those idiots praying (snidely) for each other in the US is an example. It rather reminds me of a bit of footage I once saw where a Hindu woman, when asked about the fate of those people who believe in Christianity, said that when they advanced enough spiritually they would finally get it right and be reborn as Hindus. The idea did not go down well with the predominantly conservative Christian students despite the fact that those same students, when questioned earlier, felt that unless Hindus accepted Christ as their savior, they would not be going to heaven.
We don’t seem to be able to help ourselves. We cannot seem to act reasonably when our identity narratives are shown to be just that, narratives that are not universal.
I suppose the US case bothers me because the egregious display of irrationality is setting fire to Western Civilization. There is real fear involved in the end of the American Empire and the consequences it will have before human life resettles in the coming centuries.
Despite this, my recent upset really got legs when I started to listen to the five, one-hour podcasts of Charles Taylor, the eminent Canadian philosopher who won the very prestigious Templeton Prize in 2007.
The Templeton Prize honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify “entrepreneurs of the spirit”—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.
Taylor is a practicing Roman Catholic, and while a wonderful philosopher and human being in many ways, he, nevertheless, fell prey to that need to play benevolent one-up-manship with (in this case) what he called the militant atheists. It was soooooooo depressing I had to take a break from the podcasts after hour two and I have yet to go back to the remainder.
(Don’t know about you but I find that “gentle-faced” whip-hand much more horrific than the more honest expression of simple outrage.)
What makes it so bad for me is that there is much that Taylor speaks to that makes sense. He is a devotee of Merleau-Ponty for example, and has many wise things to say about what knowledge can and cannot be. His ideas on communitarianism are outstanding and his sense of human beings as “situated selves” and “self interpreting animals” is clearly much more in line with how we actually are than the idea of us as radical individuals comprehending the world through a series of deep, logical rational structures and algorithms. In other words, we are unfolding narratives and not a series of running programs. My problem starts when it appears that Taylor conflates the unfolding narrative structure of human living with his particular narrative that casts god in its center. (Stars I hope I’m wrong about that.)
Taylor has this book called A Secular Age. I have yet to read it, although, now that I am so upset with the dude, I will.
He examines the development in “Western Christendom” of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today’s secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion–although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined–but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations. What this means for the world–including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence–is what Charles Taylor grapples with…
Sound good doesn’t it. Yet after that bit in hour-two of the podcast, a bit in which he speaks to Richard Dawkin’s brand of atheism, I have doubts about my mental stability when I get around to reading Taylor. (I have been known to throw a book or two at the wall in my ire.)
What Taylor does in that brief section is to compare the emotional quality of the religious reaction to the rise of things like Darwinism to Dawkins’ reaction to religion. What Taylor says is that the “militant atheists” thought the secular revolution was won and now, with the recent rise in religious sentiment, they are scared in the same way the bishops were with the rise in secularism: equal reactionaries. The only truth to that is that both Dawkins and the bishops displayed emotion with respect to their particular concerns. (Note: I’m off to get a written version of these lectures so I can look at this section in writing. I find it so hard to believe Taylor could be so silly. I’ll let you know what I find.)
High emotion is not enough to define whether a position is irrational. Compare: woman A is outraged at the attempted rape of her sister; woman B is outraged that woman A is mad at at woman B’s brother for attempting the rape. Woman A and B are equally outraged. Don’t you think that these two positions bespeak differing levels of rationality?
Anyway, I’m going to read a couple of Taylor’s books in a month or so (current TBR piles are perilously high and need to be whittled) and by that time I will have finished the podcasts and calmed down a bit. Hopefully he won’t do anything else to set me off again.
July 3rd, 2011
entering into an argument
The thing I miss most about grad school are the arguments. When people talk about things, utilize fact and reason, base belief on evidence and logical coherence, there is a sense built up over time of belonging, of understanding, of being at home in the world. When I started Tailfeather, in part I did that to encourage similar experiences, and the net has provided lots of opportunity to engage that, if not always in my (rather specifc and narrow) areas of obsession.
Today, browsing, I went to Not Exactly Rocket Science (wonderful blog!) and clicked on the first link: “ “If this were true adios theory.” Darwin’s margin scribbles show the evolution of a theory” and there was this wonderful picture. I mean I just sank into it.
I presumed it to be Darwin’s personal library. That feeling I get when I argue (discuss based on evidence) – it roared to the surface just looking at this picture. Imagine such a room to one’s self! I also read the article at Wired Science about Darwin’s marginalia and it is the Down House library “View of Darwin’s Library on the shelves of Down House, circa 1876″. Wonderful.
The article presents some pictures of the notes Darwin made whilst reading and arguing with the logic and content of the text. There’s something so deeply wonderful about being inside Darwin’s mind as he engages with idea and theory.
From the article:
Adios Theory
Henslow, one of Darwin’s professors, directed him to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The book, which he smothered in notes, became central to Darwin’s theory.
In Principles Lyell writes that the earth was formed by slow-moving processes, still in operation today, and argues against Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s view of evolution.
Lamark thought creatures could alter their characteristics in a single lifetime, then pass those changes to offspring. A giraffe, for example, could lengthen its neck and have calves with slightly longer necks. Lyell said species could adapt, but only within narrow bounds.
This posed a problem for Darwin’s ideas. On the final page of Lyell’s Principles of Geology Darwin writes, “If this were true adios theory.”
Adios theory…poor Lamark, did he ever lose that particular discussion. And now you can see for yourself. Darwin’s manuscripts project is available to all of us here.
I think I’ll make the picture of his library my desktop for a while.
May 2nd, 2011
“theories” we live by OR the stories that story us
If you’ve ever heard a creationist say evolution is “just a theory” you know that there is more than one meaning attached to the word “theory”. Keep that in mind while you read this, and later, when you think about the implications.
It seems that our theories about how people of our gender usually feel can influence our memory of how we actually felt. Gender is but one of many theories that have this power to alter our memories. For instance, Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts. In one study, volunteers carried hand held computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day. These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers. But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had flet less happy and not more. In a study using similar methodology, Hispanic Americans and European Americans reported feeling pretty much the same during week, but the Hispanic Americans remembered feeling happier than the European Americans did. Not all theories involve some immutable characteristic of persons, such as gender or culture. For example, which students tend to score highest on an exam—those who worry about grades, or those who don’t ? As a college professor, I can tell you that my own theory is that students who are deeply concerned about their performance tend to study more and hence outscore their more lackadaisical classmates. Apparently students have the same theory, because research shows that when students do well on an exam, they remember feeling more anxious before the exam than they actually felt, and when students do poorly on an exam, they remember feeling less anxious before the exam than they actually felt.
We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt. The problem with this error of retrospection is that it can keep us from discovering our errors of prospection…
Interesting don’t you think? Humans are so not natural scientists in some really important ways. But such “theories” and their effects explain a great deal, no?
April 25th, 2011
deeply irritating, but why? faith, belief and argument
I’m an irritable kind of person, this is true, but some things really do deserve one’s disapprobation.
Amongst bits of behaviour that fall into this category are people who criticize new software programs without first having opened them, let alone used them, academics who write religious apologia as an academic rather than as a person of faith, people who critique books they haven’t actually read, and those who speak knowingly about subjects they don’t understand but don’t like (intuitively?) using broken logic and other acts of self-righteous justification.
What set this particular bout of irritation off? You should well ask.
Several years ago now I took a philosophy class in which a co-student gave his end of term paper presentation on the topic of why it is so difficult to be a man of faith in these times, and why it is so easy to be an atheist.
OK, so I actually really liked the guy. He was a techie, and they tend to be my favourite kind of person. He was kind, thoughtful, caring and devoted to his family. All of these things are good things, at least to me. His particular religion doesn’t matter at all. Nor does the the fact that he sees faith as a difficult thing to maintain. I suspect that’s actually very true given most of his life was dependent upon understanding the world of fact and science, which, of course, is one of the things continually eroding the ground on which faith is built.
What pissed me off was the fact that he thinks it’s easy to be an atheist without ever having attempted to understand what the world-view entails, and that the ease or difficulty of some position has anything whatsoever to do with its veracity. I mean Jeez dude, think. But it wasn’t my class, and I wasn’t going to step on the teacher’s toes and call him on it in class. I just let it go.
But then I ran into the very same argument yesterday on a blog. I’m not going to name it; I don’t really care what the blogger believes in, nor that s/he can’t summon up the will to think through his/her justifications for finding it difficult to maintain faith in supernatural powers. I don’t care what the blogger believes but I do care about how the blogger behaves; and the two seem clearly connected.
The obvious fact that atheism is still embattled, that one’s ability to hold a public position is compromised if one is not some sort of theist, seems to bely the position that it is easy. But this is a social sense of the word “easy.” By this sense being a Christian in North America is a much easier proposition. I suspect even being some sort of “deeply spiritual” person is easier than being an atheist in this sense.
But that word “easy” can be used in more than one way, right? I am sure that that some atheists find it easy in the way the blogger and my erstwhile co-student meant it—being a man of faith requires so much energetic creativity today, at least in the part of the world where all the facts central to our lives deny the likelihood of the objects of said faith, and none of this creativity is required of an atheist.
I do suspect it’s true that the rise in atheism of late has much to do with the hero worship inundating the four horsemen. With a mouth like the one on Hitch, what’s not to adore? Certainly our social and cultural dependency on science has much to do with the rise in athesim, as does the accumulation of data and video on the terrible behaviours of a whole historical bevy of men of faith. I mean really, how many dead gypsies, Jews and broken towers do we need to see before that real-life horror story gets old?
Sorry. I really am irritated. I tend to rant when that happens.
Philosophy classes, like the internet, are full of people who don’t seem to understand that sliding between word meanings endangers the validity of the argument. Just because the terms “easy” and “easy” look the same doesn’t mean that their various meanings are equivalent. What is socially “easy”—as in conforming to the public sense of what is acceptable—is not the same as what is rationally “easy”— as in something so well supported by data that it’s plain silly not to “believe” in it.
Let me give you an example of rationally easy: I “believe” in the notions of force and cause and effect in the material universe. That is, I “believe” that if I throw a rock through my window I am going to break it. I don’t think that the spirit of the glass just happens to shatter itself as the spirit of the rock manifests in the space that used to be occupied by my window. It’s not only silly not to believe in force and in cause and effect in the material universe, not believing in such things bespeaks a mental discombobulation, and frankly, I’d challenge any sane person to behaviourally display such a disbelief. I mean what? They walk directly in front of speeding cars to prove that cause and effect doesn’t exist?
Gads! Such disingenuousness. Still, negotiating the divide between normal human behaviour and the proposed lack of belief in cause and effect does require enormous creativity. Some of the explanatory narratives that result are really quite interesting. Leibniz, for example.
So there’s the problem with the blogger’s lack understanding of the slipperiness of language and the frankly silly assumption that because something is difficult to maintain it is therefore more valuable. Under that guiding hand, we should still be struggling to reconcile Ptolemy with NASA’s need to get scientific instrumentation to places like Mars. Imagine, Ptolemaic rocket science! That makes me smile. Never heard of Occam?
But it doesn’t answer my question of why such normal internet thinking irritates me so deeply.
To be honest I don’t like atheism via hero-worship any better than faith by fallacious argumentation. Both are irrational. Not that there isn’t value in the irrational. Of course there is. I mean I interpret dreams, read tarot, read Leibniz and Deleuze for goodness sake. But one “belief” is not like another. The belief in cause and effect in the material universe is not the same as a belief in supernatural forces. It’s one of those slippery words, like “easy” or “theory”.
It’s “just a theory“…. that one is getting really old since it displays such a willful ignorance and the deeply disrespectful act of not even attempting to understand that which you repudiate. And this is what bothers me, I suppose. It’s the blatant disrespect, not only of me—which doesn’t matter since the blogger doesn’t know me, and my erstwhile co-student was intent on defending himself from my perspicacity—but also illustrates a deep disrespect of himself and his attendant beliefs.
You really care so little about what you believe that you cannot be bothered to think it through cleanly? I value what you believe more than that, and I don’t share in it.
But I suspect what is even deeper, and why the thorn of it still lingers after several years, is that it appears like my co-student and the blogger don’t value reason at all. They don’t reason because they don’t trust it. They think feeling is a better guide to human happiness. Romantics they are, alive and well long after Wordsworth climbed that particular mountain. Of course the problem is that reason and feeling are not seperable functions in the human mind and so such contemporary Romantics, untutored in sound logic because of culturally received distrust, use an ill-formed and non-viable “logic” to support their faith in their feeling – what the blogger called common sense. But still it comes down to a lack of respect of their own mind, of the very feeling function they so assiduously defend. Without sound reasoning feeling abhors human life. Just ask Phineas Gage. Or Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger.
Feeling, like reason, is critical to human life. This is why I am so fascinated by religiousity. It is a primary site of feeling in human beings and a site where narrative, feeling, reason and the material world meet. Religion might be wrong in its analysis of the material world, but it is still vastly important because it is a key part of the human analysis of human life. It is a phenomenological database. Religion and our metaphysical concepts of reality are, along with art, by far the best source of data that we have for what it feels like to be a human being.
Because of the importance of religion and spirituality in the human universe, just because you believe it to be materially true as well as narratively true, doesn’t give you a pass on treating the phenomenon with respect. Religion is dangerous and deeply human. Treating it with the disrespect attendant upon your use of faulty logic is like a cat fancier turning her back on a ravenous lion. Stupid, man. Stupid.
And that’s what bothers me the most. It’s so deeply stupid to take your life so lightly.
April 23rd, 2011
May 21 approaches/when the facts are not enough
Some time ago I posted a couple of bits about a book called When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, or more accurately, posts about my (then) current thinking about the implications of what Festinger has to say. When I was reading today I came across a piece in Mother Jones in the same vein.
The article is interested in political persuasion and contemporary denialism – you know the people who think that autism is caused by vaccinations (despite all the evidence to the contrary), the people who think the earth was created in 7 days and that life does not evolve (despite all the evidence to the contrary), the people who believe the climate is not changing and even if it is what humans do has no impact (despite all the evidence to the contrary). Those guys. In Festinger’s study they are called The Seekers.
In the annals of denial, it doesn’t get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin’s space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there’s plenty to go around. And since Festinger’s day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called “motivated reasoning” helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, “death panels,” the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
There four pages of interesting information about this, and science does not escape the analysis.
And it’s not just that people twist or selectively read scientific evidence to support their preexisting views. According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, people’s deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider “scientific consensus” to lie on contested issues…
…Indeed, there’s a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities, explains Yale’s Kahan, “People who say, ‘I think there’s something to climate change,’ that’s going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”
It comes down the fact that facts can’t persuade under these kinds of circumstances. So what then? Education?
In a 2008 Pew survey, for instance, only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.
So not education. Or at least that by itself isn’t enough. Mother Jones suggests careful presentation of data inside an already acceptable model tailored to the group you want to inform.
Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
I accept this as almost certainly true but mentally rebel anyway. Still, I know that when May 22 comes along and when Harold Camping‘s group find themselves still here, they will not renounce the silliness. They’ll just dig in deeper. And partly that is because they value faith over data; they want the emotional comfort of belonging much more than they want the satisfaction of having an accurate view of reality.
My rebellion comes because such behaviour, such irrationality, offends me. I want to believe that facts are enough of a persuasion despite the clear evidence that they are not. Yet, I know that I have (and do) tailor my way of speaking about things depending upon which group of people/family I am with. I am an atheist, for example, but I am perfectly capable of speaking about spirits when in the sweat. And I have no intention to defraud. I am speaking what I feel to be true in the terms under which people I care very much about can hear me.
Nevertheless, such culture crossing, such a liminal stance, is difficult, time-consuming and requires enormous physical and emotional effort. And if the studies Mother Jones references in the article are true, some of us just can’t stand the world a liminal stance illuminates. So there will always be some of us that jump out of the unknown and unknowable center where uncertainty reigns and one is asked to always walk on the uncertain surface of civilization’s waters. Some of us will always hop back to shore and into a black “yes” or “no.”
Here’s another fact: May 22 will arrive so we will be required to keep going. The only choice is how we go.
December 13th, 2010
why read such an illogical thing as alchemy?
Someone inquired of me, if I know that most alchemy (and other assorted) texts have an “abysmally poor logic” underpinning the thought system, why do I bother with them?
Here’s my reply:
Apart from the sheer enjoyment of another mind there is the issue of the difference between reason and efficacy. Imagine you are visiting with a friend in her kitchen. You complain of a headache and she gives you a cup of tea to drink. The tea is bitter but you trust your friend and so drink the tea. You carry on a slow but pleasant conversation and after about 30 minutes you notice that your headache is much less severe and after a further 20 minutes or so of more animated conversation you realize your headache is gone.
At this point several more people show up and enter the kitchen. After introductions, conversation turns to the pot of tea on the table out of which you drank. Someone begins to pour a cup for themselves but your friend demurs saying that it is willow bark and she will make some plain black tea for everyone. As she begins this the group starts relating their various stories about why (and if) the willow bark tea cured your headache. Someone says that it is the spirit of the willow that takes the pain. Another person talks about poison in cells and the cleansing effect of natural remedies upon the body. A third speaks of acetylsalicylic acid and it’s naturally found variants. A fourth says it was the conversation that did it; a person says it was just coincidence – uttering the word “monad”. There are other stories involving djinns, angels, astrological alignments and heavy metals in our atmosphere.
Do any of these stories have anything to do with the relationship between your drinking the tea and your headache’s recession? That is, if you hadn’t heard all these stories would it have made any difference to the fact that your headache left?
Of course there are problems with many of the explanatory stories. One of those is that none of them will test well experimentally except for one. There’s another problem, too. Say on another occasion you have a headache again, you drink willow bark tea but in an hour you still have a headache. Does this mean the tea didn’t work the first time or that there’s another problem? The only way to know is through understanding and experimentation. At this point the stories and their reliability and testability does matter. But still, knowing the actual explanation for how something works does not change the fact that it works.
The real problem is if people come into things through the story rather than the efficacy (or lack thereof) of something. So if I started with the spirit story and doggedly stuck with it, I’d be propitiating willow tree spirits when my headache didn’t go away instead of experimenting with (say) meditation as a relaxation technique, or exercise, or eliminating getting drunk every night. I’d not take the time to figure out under what actual conditions the willow bark worked and when the different kinds of head pain required differing kinds of responses. This is what makes the acetylsalicylic acid story different from the rest. That story is founded first and foremost on testability and repeatability whereas the other stories are based on narrative delight. This means the acetylsalicyclic acid story will happily change itself to fit the facts whereas the other stories will expect the facts to fit the narrative.
Here’s the thing with alchemy and such like systems of explanation—you need to separate the story from the bits that have some effect in the world and go with the bits that work. Then you need to match them up with other bits that have come to your attention through completely different stories. If you do that then you can find great value in human narratives like alchemy without losing your analytical mind to the illogical abyss.
December 9th, 2010
experience/belief and reason
I am reading Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. It is the result of her doctoral thesis and seeks to examine the ways in which largely intelligent, well educated middle class persons in Britain come to be persuaded of the efficacy of magic. I am struggling, now, with its implications.
I actually read it for the first time some 18 years ago and have returned to it because of her theory – something she calls interpretive drift. I won’t talk about that here in any detail but essentially people move slowly through a series of changes in which they learn to interpret the world differently—in her subject’s case, as magical. In addition, her research showed that belief wasn’t the core reason for participation. Also, while participants would, when pushed, provide ad hoc rationalizations for their participation in magical ritual, that wasn’t really what interested them. These verbalized beliefs and rationalizations seemed to come more from a sense of the general population’s disparagement and antagonism than from anything inherent in the drift itself.
While I acknowledge that I haven’t finished the book, what Luhrmann seems to surmise is that participants were provided, via the practice of magic, valuable experience and a way of interpreting the world that allowed them to feel involved, embedded, and functional in ways additional to their “normal” and very functional careers and larger social lives. These people, to be clear, are just like you and me: they can think, reason, feel and function with the best of us. What they can do, just like us, is compartmentalize: magic now, C++ later.
In other words, belief wasn’t the thing to be explained. The proper question is not how some people come to believe in that which is not realistic but how all of us explain away our irrationalities. Neither belief nor rationality were the concepts needed for anthropological understanding of the practice of magic in the post-enlightenment 20th and 21st centuries, but rather what we need to comprehend is experience itself, how experience can be trained and the apparently fundamental need to feel awe and power (which the practice of witchcraft can provide). Phenomenal experience is the site of such an endeavour—belief and reason are just latter-day support structures for interpretive frameworks that provide the bones of a livable narrative. And witchcraft proves to be one of those.
The thing I like best about the book is that its insights are applicable to all of us and not just to those who practice magic. We are all deeply irrational, deeply creatures of feeling and desire. The best we can do is have some checks and balances in place – what is often called the scientific method and peer review – to leash our natures. I am not suggesting that our basic emotionality/irrationality is bad. Not at all. As Damasio shows our feelings make good decisions possible. But our feelings also make suicide bombers possible as well as those parents who pray their sick children to death. I think a leash is a good metaphor – a leash woven in large part of that which is empirically testable. But of course here is where I run into trouble.
Why should we leash ourselves? What makes rationality something to value when so many disdain it as hubristic and value instead a life dedicated to someone or something designated as more true, more valuable than the particular self? My answer to that has always been because of the social dangers of projecting self onto another – no matter whether the another has material reality or not. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the site of projection is a god or a king, it never seems to end well for those who beg to differ, and often not well for those who beg to agree.
There is no way to assess the relative values of these different human stances since the underpinnings of each are moral. That is, this decision can only be based, fundamentally, on what we value. What matters more? –the mind? –the body? –the society? –the earth and all it denizens? –or some other category of human/earth nature, such as a soul, spirit or universal being? Because this is a moral decision it has no possibility of empirical foundation since morals are consequences of human narrative. But even that–some would say “no,” human morals are not really ours so much as something we divine from some other more important source. Personally, I value the evolutionary struggle of survival for those creatures on earth today, and this is because I am one of them. I know my descendants and I need a diverse ecology to survive so I value behaviours and beliefs that support such a survival. But what if you really believe in the gnostic idea that this material plain is evil and that incorporeal existence is both possible and the only thing that has real value?
Undecidable. And I still don’t want to be subjected to some instigated Armageddon because they are sure they are right. Maybe that’s the distinction? I am OK with their practice/truth but they are not with mine?
I am human and so have the need for awe, delight and reflection. Luhrmann’s subjects found these things in the practice of witchcraft, in magic. My background predisposes me to agree with them, and yet I find most of my sense of reverence in science and its methodology. Not to say I think of science as a religion. I don’t, but there is a deep wonder to be found in the small things of the world that have been revealed to us through the empirical practices of scientists.
Perhaps the best I can do is accept the intent of Wittgenstein when he said that science and religion are two very different language games. Yet, I have to acknowledge that the methodologies of science are not just language games but a way of thinking that is fundamentally different than narrative, which of course drives all forms of religion. I mean there is a component of those who are scientists that is narratively based. They are human, after all. The construction of meaning is very largely a game and it is built upon the methodologies and structures that define “narrative” as a methodology. But it is not the only methodology that scientists use. This other, the thing most properly called science, is that methodology, and this methodology repeatedly reaches out to the shared world of our lives, the physical world, the testable world, to see if its growing “narrative” matches with what’s there. And it doesn’t do it alone or limit it to a small community of devotees. This is the process of peer review and it can be so brutal in its “checking” activities that I think it would be a good training ground for those who aspire to play hockey. This checking in with what the world is actually like and measuring the growing narrative against the empirical world is something religion does not make a practice of encouraging.
What Luhrmann’s research suggests is that we need both organizing principles, both narrative and science. One is not more important than the other. What it also suggests, though, is that, given the ease by which we are persuaded, we do need a “leash” and the only other mode of thinking we humans have that can function this way is analysis, what is often called critical thinking, and when it uses the world as a place of final arbitration and reference, called science. But this requires us to accept the fundamental value of material evidence. Aaaaaaaaaargh. Back to where I started.