Thinking in Symbols, Speaking in Tongues

Theology, schmeology. Jimmy Swaggart's musical, tribal, shamanistic approach to religion.

What is church without music? Probably not much fun. Even Islam has smuggled in a musical tradition in the form of the call to prayer, which is often a virtuoso vocal performance. The important role music has in most religions is a sign that their gatherings are social bonding events, not scientific conferences. One of the clearest instances is the televangelism of Jimmy Swaggart, still going strong after 45 years. At its core are his amazing piano and vocal abilities, combined with a very tight band and other featured singers. A cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, his talent was recognized early on, but instead of joining the recording industry, he built his own evangelical empire, whose broadcasts are heavy on the music, and light on the theology. The music is an extremely comforting, a sort of bluesy, (this is from Louisiana, after all), cross between Lawrence Welk and African American Church gospel. The focus is on praise and succor from god ("Take my hand, precious lord", "Jesus, use me", "I'll never be lonely again", "Sheltered in the arms of God", "What a friend we have in Jesus").

It is a little reminiscent of the gatherings of DeadHeads, finding a comforting sacrament of friendship and love in an endless bluesy/country jam, heavy on the sentiment. Yes, the Pentecostal / Swaggart version is a lot more conservative, and its love doesn't come from a puff of smoke, but the equally vaporous triumvarate of holy spirit, Jesus, and god. What theology there is is virtually stripped of any sense, however, consisting of archetypal references to give the whole jam more emotional power. It is, essentially, the power of shamanism.

For example, the creed of the ministry is:

“Dear Lord Jesus, I now realize that I am a sinner. I accept the fact that You died for me on the rugged Cross of Calvary. I now open my heart’s door and receive You as Saviour and Lord of my life. Please take full control of me and help me to be the kind of Christian You want me to be. Amen.”

Why "rugged"? How can Jesus take control when he no longer exists, and we do not know where he is or what he wants? OK, call me skeptical! Anyhow, the answer is always prayer, and the Swaggarts claim "Without a daily communication with our heavenly Father, we will only go so far in this Christian life, which won’t be very far, spiritually speaking." Prayer is the cell phone call to god, keeping Him up to date with what we want, and telling us what He wants. What does this really mean? It means one's conscience is going to do the talking, (at best), and its quality is going to be the tenor of our supposed talk with god. This might expain the problems that Swaggart himself has had in the sin department. It also means that anyone who can infiltrate our conscience and purport to tell us what god wants may end up with a great deal of control over our actions. For example, the ministry offers a wide range of "The truth about..." videos, telling the flock why Mormons, Catholics, Muslims, even Seventh-Day Adventists, are wrong and bad. The "full control of me" formulation could be taken as a little sinister, not just to keep the tribal boundaries clear, but to milk the flock for money, and drive a highly conservative political message that is in many respects rather uncharitable.

And control is surely what is going on here. The bonding is very strong and social, starting with the music and the TV shows, but extending to more intense "Camp Meetings" and other events around the country. Advertisements for youth events gush about how attendees feel the presence of the lord during the event. Theoretically, god is supposed to be everywhere, not anywhwere in particular, so these charismatic settings and climaxes are a clear sign of shamanism, not of any coherent theology, let alone philosophy.

The magazine, aside from advertisements for a rich assortment of ministry products, is full of word-salad theology, with submission urged to the will of Christ, or other spirits, so that the "Blood of the Lamb" can wash over the sinners in the pews, cleansing them of their sins. Sermons and blessings are "anointed", messages are "Spirit-baptized", and the "Powers of Darkness" are fought. This church is the "Bride of Christ", and good believers have "eyes of the spirit" to see "the things that lurk in darkness". The whole thing is a work of art, really- a poetry of metaphor which is highly meaningful without actually meaning anything concrete or real in this world. But when it comes to the prices, things are naturally far more explicit "Your price just $10 each".

Televangelism remains a remarkable phenomenon, drawing on the implicit cultural assumptions in favor of Christianity, on blues and gospel music, and on the power of personal magnetism and group bonding to comfort the lonely and lost. If the message were stripped down to the hymns alone, it would be a positive social force.

"If God Is Dead Who's This Living In My Soul?"

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• Making Afghanistan great again.

Religion as Science Fiction

What if theology is regarded as SciFi?

How seriously do you take science fiction? Obviously, being called "fiction", it is neither science nor any other kind of truth. Yet it is full of "truthiness"- plausible-ish technologies, settings related to our own, typically in the future, and human dramas more or less rich. It also often offers sweeping, even eschatological-scale, plots. But how can science fiction deal in human meaning if it does not deal in theology, given that the religiously inclined naturally think that meaning is given to us, not by our own ideas or efforts, but by a theos?

Obviously, one can turn that around and claim that theologies are themselves made up, and, far from scientifically observing a meaning given from on high, are exercises in making meaning, all the more effective for denying their underlying fictionality. In any case, I think science fiction is clearly the closest genre to religion, and caters to readers/viewers who have basically religious needs and temperaments.

From Jesus and Mo.

It is the science fiction fans who expect philosophical ruminations on what it means to be human, tales of a far future when humanity will have escaped the bonds of earth, often magical events and capabilities, and unimaginably powerful alien beings. Subspace, mind-melds, apocalyptic wars ... it is just a another word for supernatural.

Likewise, our ancestors clearly had the same idea(s). How better to illustrate their dreams, both bad and good, but with inflated archetypal beings and conflicts? The Ramayana reads like a Hollywood SciFi blockbuster. Why are there two versions of the Garden of Eden? It isn't because each is scientifically accurate. It is a clear statement that both are science fictions- tales of an idyll, and of an archetype.

Rama, flying in his vimana.

Why our cultures should have harbored such humorless, spiritually dead people as to take these tales seriously is beyond me. It is probably a testament to the bureaucratic mindset- the organization-alized person who clutches at tradition and order, (and certainty/explanation), over imagination and play. And over time, the original imaginative, introspective impulse is so crusted over that even the most sensitive and insightful people have no choice but to take the truth-dogma seriously as an external or historical reality, and proceed to make nonsense of what began as a wonderful work of art.

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• Another theologian employed at a public university- heaven knows why.
• Fox and Friends. Or frenemies.

This is Progress?

We are eating ourselves out of house and home.

Werner Herzog made a documentary about Chauvet cave, the respository of spectacular cave art from circa 31,000 years ago. One striking aspect is that virtually all the animals pictured there, and whose remains are found there, are extinct. The aurochs, cave bears, steppe bison, northern rinoceri, cave lions, cave hyenas- all gone. These are animals that had taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions years, to evolve, yet a few tens of thousands of years later, they, along with the mammoths and other denizens of countless prior ice ages, are gone. What happened to them? We killed and ate them.

We then proceeded to raise human populations through agriculture, and carve up the Earth's surface for farming. We have been clearing competitors continuously, from wolves and lions, down to insects. After a false start with overly destructive DDT, agriculture has now settled on neonicotinoids, which, while less persistent in the food chain, have created a silent holocaust of insects, resulting in dead zones throughout agricultural areas, the not-so mysterious collapse of bees, and declines in all kinds of once-common insects.

Similarly, the oceans have been vacuumed of fish, with numerous collapsed and collapsing populations. And topping it all off is climate change and ocean acidification, which is gradually finishing the job of killing off Australia's Geat Barrier Reef, many other reefs around the world, as well as terrestrial species at high latitudes and altitudes.

Have humans made progress? We have, in technical, organizational, and even moral terms. But while we pat ourselves on the back for our space age, smart phones, and hyper-connected intelligence, we also live on an ever-more impoverished planet, due mostly to overpopulation plus the very same develpment we value so much. Institutions and ideologies like the Catholic church who continue to see nothing wrong with infinite population increase in a competitive quest for domination by sheer, miserable numbers are, in this limited and declining world, fundamentally immoral.

The US, after its destruction and displacement of Native Americans, has grown up on an ideology of open frontiers and endless space. But now the political and social ramifications of overpopulation and overdevelopment are beginning to be felt. Trumpism is one reaction- the visceral feeling that we just do not have the room any more, given our unwillingness to develop the requisite infrastructure, and our evident environmental degradation, even in a relatively sparsely populated country, for millions of further immigrants.

Economic inequality is not directly associated with this deep underlying Malthusian trend, since humans can degrade their environment under any economic regime- socialist, capitalist, or Keynesian. But it does provide a metaphor, with us humans lording it over our fellow creatures on the planet. Creatures whom we frequently invoke in our art and spiritual rhetoric and claim to regard with caring stewardship, even humane-ness. But then we keep killing and mistreating them anyhow.

We need to take sustainability seriously, both in terms of human populations and stewardship of the planet generally. E. O. Wilson has advocated for returning half our land to the wild, for the creatures that need it so desperately. This would be a supreme act of generosity and abstention. Though not even enough, in this age of global warming, it is part of the answer towards true sustainability.

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• Markets are not rational.

Euhemerization

People making gods, as usual- and the mythical nature of Jesus.

All aspects of the existence and nature of Jesus are a matter of theory, not fact. So much of the early literature about him is forged, made-up, laced by myth and parable, and templated by religious traditions, philosophical preconceptions and political exigencies, that the nature of (or existence of) the actual, historical Jesus is a matter of speculation and inference at best.

Bart Ehrman wrote an exasperated book about the evidence for the historical Jesus, affirming, despite his own lack of conventional faith, and through his dedicated scholarship in the field, that the consensus position of Christians and scholars is correct. The problem of the thin-ness of the evidence remains, however, since all the evidence comes from internal (Christian) and late (not contemporaneous) sources. This is not unusual or unexpected for any Roman of this time, other than the very highest levels of emperors and writers, but hardly allows a solid case either pro or con. A great deal turns, for instance, on one's interpretation of the word "brother", since Paul, in letters that are widely agreed to be reasonably authentic, refers to James as a brother of Jesus. If this means a biological brother, it means that Jesus, by this chain of evidence, really existed biologically. Whether his mother was a perpetual virgin is another matter, of course! Or was James a spiritual brother, as is the common usage has been for many religious communities? Ehrman, as an expert, comes down clearly on the biological side.

Myth, or just mythic?

Both cases, for and against the historicity of Jesus, are thus circumstantial, based on the credibility of scraps of evidence, or the credibility of a counter-story elaborated by the mythicists, where Jesus begins as a deity who is brought down to earth (euhemerized) for a variety of motives that are quite understandable, and precedented by similar gods and god-men before and since. Casting one's god as a real person makes the provenance and stability of his teachings more secure than that of a deity that communicates through revelation, and could do so again at any time. And stories are easy to make up and write down. A recent talk by Richard Carrier makes this case with gusto.

I am not going rehash the arguments here. But only say that the pro-historical case, while certainly traditional, popular, and even likely, is, even by Bart Ehrman's telling, hung on very thin threads of internal evidence, on texts whose transmission to us is an endless story of copying, re-copying, correction, obfuscation, politics, and forgery. The early Christian times are a fascinating period of political and archetypal turmoil. No path is straight, least of all the texts that purport to tell the story. Take for instance, the case of Marcion, who supposedly collected letters of Paul and devised the first Christian cannon. Marcion is thought to have written a good bit of it himself, and founded a theology that was very popular in its day, only to ripen into heresy later on at the hands of what comes down to us as orthodoxy.

The project of making Christianity's hodge-podge of scriptures fit the orthodox story as it evolved through the centuries is mind-bogglingly complicated and obviously ongoing, given the many versions of the Bible and of Christianity that are still running around. The process is reminiscent of the paradox of Islam, where those who take its origins and scripture most seriously are the most righteous and violent, whereas those who merge into more mature traditions, as they ripened through time into human, and typically humane, institutions, are much more resistant to the fundamentalist call.

Getting back to the foundations, what is the precedent for euhemerization such as what happened to the person or entity we call Jesus? And for its complement, apotheosis? These days, the traffic between heaven and earth has hit some kind of traffic jam. But in antiquity, it was far more common for people such as kings and emperors to become gods, and also for gods to come down to earth, in tales such as the Homeric epics. Divinity was assumed to exist, and divine beings were pretty much formed in the image of ourselves, at our most powerful. Both the Jewish god(s) and the Greek gods were distinguished by their power much more than their knowledge, let alone their emotional wisdom or kindness.

Even farther back, the template is of course the family, and the trauma of death. The death of any person, let alone a powerful, archetypal person like a parent, is unimaginable. How can life stop cold, how can existence simply end? Impossible. We have thus come up with a rich set of rationalizations and theologies of additional existence. They typically involve the movement of people (souls) from this world to some other invisible world, where they look back with fondness to what is still the important place, our world.

But then comes the important question of whether and how this spritual world, if it is to have any ongoing function for us, interacts with ours. Our souls clearly have some modus operandi by which they co-function with our living bodies, mortal though they are. Likewise, spirits and gods must have some way back into the world if we wish to involve them in our dramas. Thus we end up with a rich literature of heroic journeys to heaven (or the underworld) and back, gods taking up disguises as women or men (or animals), throwing thunderbolts, causing natural cataclysms, etc.

It is only the higher psychological and philosophical sophistication of our age that has slowed down this traffic, though it peeks out of our unconscious in the endless array of super-hero movies, not to mention a majority of the country that still holds fast to some version of the traditional theological stories.

Let us close with a couple of quotes from Thomas Paine speaking of the Christian believer, vs a true deist, from his deist book, "The Age of Reason":

"Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility, and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions. He finds fault with everything. His selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the govemment of the universe. He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say -- thou knowest not so well as I."

"The Bible of the creation is inexhaustible in texts. Every part of science, whether connected with the geometry of the universe, with the systems of animal and vegetable life, or with the properties of inanimate matter, is a text as well for devotion as for philosophy -- for gratitude, as for human improvement. It will perhaps be said, that if such a revolution in the system of religion takes place, every preacher ought to be a philosopher. Most certainly, and every house of devotion a school of science."

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The Women of Deseret

What about feminism? A collision with the modern world. 

Continuing from last week, a particularly interesting topic in the field of Mormonism is the role of women. The church calls itself a "restored" Christianity, which is a fundamentalist position, in that it claims to attempt to reproduce the conditions of the early church, and proselytizes on that basis. This includes naming apostles, extending priesthood to all men, and thorough-going patriarchy. It even meant, during its formative period in the mid to late 1800's, polygamy, based on a bit of cherry-picking from the Old Testament.

Polygamy was also based on a revelation from god to Joseph Smith. One that his (sole) wife at the time, Emma, knew what to do with. She physically burned that revelation, by some accounts. She also agitated against this new doctrine, turning the female relief society into such a dangerous organ that the church leaders shut it down for a couple of decades, after which it was reconstituted and has behaved in properly submissive fashion ever since.

An intriguing aspect of polygamy is the patent lies and dissimulation practised in its defense. The Mormon authors of "The Mormon Expereince" insist that a large part of the rationale (as was the case for Muhammed and Islam) was to provide for otherwise unattached women, the destitute, and to correct for an excess of women due to warfare, etc. But the West in the US always had an excess of men (though see here). More tellingly, polygamy was not a matter of charity, but a reward to the highest officers of the church for their obvious spiritual blessings, to be converted into power and children. The fourth president of the church had six wives and forty-three children. The book also relates that if economically possible, a husband would build separate houses for each of his wives.

This hardly reflects how harmonious the institution was on behalf of women, or how charitable it was towards the destitute. No, it portrays a system of power-mad men, perhaps not wearing huge beards, but otherwise rewarding themselves in a way that suggests that they were somewhat impatient about becoming gods only in the afterlife.

Brigham Young, with what resembles a rather Islamist beard.

It is a problem we also see with the veil on Islamic women. How do we judge and react to oppression when its victims are acquiescent or even explicit supporters of the system and part of a culture which, whatever its flaws, is valued by its members? Can a system of oppression be so insidious as to be invisible? This comes up in the black lives matter movement, not that blacks in the US are acquiescent or supporters of racism, (though studies show that they are also unconsciously color-ist and racist by way of indoctrination), but that non-blacks require continual consciousness raising to a condition that is so ingrained in the social fabric and unconscious that great harms are inadvertantly, and continually done, while rationalizations accrue without end whenever a question or difficulty arises.

There is no objective judgement about social affairs, unfortunately. One group may be treated differently on an objective basis, yet that treatment be justified by any number of value judgements and attitudes whose quality is not objective at all. To take the devil's advocate position for a moment, it is clear that women and men are different, mentally as well physically. Thus it is no surprise that women may typically want different things out of life than men, and might naturally prefer a social system with roles which are different and respectively suited to each gender, both in talent and desire.

To go even deeper, all social organization involves oppression. Every relationship involves expectations and some desire to get something from the other person or change the other person. No one is innocent of manipulation, least of all the infant in its crib. We are social beings, instinctively ready to make commitments of service and sacrifice, working for family, company, nation in return for uncertain, and surely incommensurate, benefits. And ultimately we benefit from the social structures we are enmeshed in, in countless ways. But that is hardly freedom. No one is free.

So the question of civil rights, of equality, and freedom, are ones of degree, not of black and white. The problem of feminism (the problem that has no name!) is one of enumerating the various qualities of people of both genders and asking which ones are relevant to our various (modern) social roles, instead of throwing a lace-trimmed blanket over the whole thing by saying that men are better than women and should run the society from top to bottom, perhaps because they are more violent and warlike.

And even more importantly, it is a project of recognizing and accepting diversity among people, so that even if women and men mostly abide by their stereotypical interests and roles, exceptions are not judged as abnormal, destabilizing, even evil. To take another example, Mormons are no great friends of introverts:

"If our composite family contains members who are temperamentally introverts or 'loners', people preferring quieter life-styles, the church programs may seem uncomfortable- or they may be looked upon as opportunities to emerge from a shell and may help to develop a more balanced personality."

The "life-style" of homosexuality is likewise a source of horror, of course.

In the context of feminism, sure, relatively few women are lesbians, or are interested in joining the infantry, or running for president. But some are, and why not let them? What point do the normative, rather than descriptive, gender roles that conservative, patriarchial institutions like the Mormon church enforce to various degrees, and push with vast amounts of propaganda, serve?

I think there are two main answers. One is the raw power of the patriarchy. As the reader may recall, it took a decade and a half after the civil rights movement for the Mormon church to ask God about the fitness of blacks for the ministry. Here is president Spencer Kimbal writing to the church:

"... we have pleaded long and earnestly on behalf of these, our faithful brethren, spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance. He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple."

Note the word "man". Whether they are beseeching god on behalf of women, we have no idea. Personally, I doubt it. The transparent secular motivation of this revelation, as transparent as the federally induced revelation banning polygamy almost a century before, could hardly be more obvious. The patriarchial system likewise, with its old testament tradition, is a institution of power, with clear secular motivations. Why else deny the obvious: that women have as much access to god as men, whatever that might mean?

The second attraction of strict roles is plain orderliness and security. If the family and church is automatically organized by way of gender roles, then that is one less source of conflict and negotiation, or so it might seem to the naive. More psychologically, some standard of "normal" is a powerful organizing principle for us individually and socially. Teenagers want nothing but to be normal, and dread the opposite. People contemplating marriage are more secure in knowing that their partners are thoroughly indoctrinated into their role's "normal" template, minimizing surprise and heartbreak. Mormon institutions up and down the ladder, such as the Women's Relief Society, hum along based heavily on the slotting of all their round pegs into nice, round holes.

One could also bring up from the archetypal depths the common image of the father figure as decider and leader, and the mother figure as nurturer and consoler. Are such images innate, or are they programmed by the patriarchy itself? And even if innate, where else do we so give in to our instincts to pattern all of society on such an archaic basis? The fact of the matter is that women are natural executives, deciding on life and death as effectively, if less violently, as men.

Maturing as individuals out of wild uncultured children involves no end of repression and self-control, to form acceptable adults ready for taking on responsible, interconnected roles in society. What is one more bit of repression, for women to accede to the patriarchial system, in all its social, political, and other dimensions?

Of course, it is simple unfairness, a reflection of ancient feudal and tribal orders where the strong rode herd over the weak. We do not accede to such systems any more in politics and professional life. (With apologies to the GOP, Donald Trump, and our whole campaign finance system.) Why should we do so elsewhere? If the Mormon church really thought so highly of the family and motherhood, it would have opened the priesthood and high offices to women long ago.

The Mormons supposedly believe in the constitution, voting for political (if not ecclesiastical) office, and ironically were leaders in women's suffrage, back in the 1800's. But that constitution is based on the enlightenment principle of equality among all people, and the need for secular, practical, and compelling reasons to deviate from that fundamental assumption. Sure, the constitution in its original incarnation debilitated women, not to mention blacks, but that has since been repaired, again by voting processes, not revelation. The Mormon church, for all its protestations of protecting the family and the sacred roles of each gender, is in this respect an anachronism. Just as much as protecting the family from the homosexual "lifestyle" is an anachronism.

Is it in this respect a "restored" church of Jesus Christ, thus a purposeful anachronism? Obviously, I am no expert. But just because patriarchy was the norm in antiquity, and all the apostles as well as prophets were men does not mean that Jesus (if and however he existed) was not open to the feminine in a spiritual and apostolic sense. There is first of all the adulation and semi-divinity of Mary. Then there is the quasi-apostle-ship of Mary Magdalene. She seems to have had more importance and faith than the rest of the apostles. Indeed, Christianity started off as a religion very accepting of women in powerful positions. In all its cherry-picking, the Mormon church seems to have, in its attachment to hierarchical patriarchy, restored the structure of Catholicism rather than the broad dispensation of Jesus.

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If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?

Reflections on competitiveness, othering and empathy.

Our sympathies radiate outward from the self in ever-widening, and attenuating, circles to family, friends, neighbors, city, nation, species, genus, order, phylum, etc. The pain of some carries great meaning and demands empathy, while others we eat for food or trample underfoot without a second thought. A recent podcast about the livestock industry described the deplorable treatment of animals raised and slaughtered for food, which seemingly is intrinsic to the industrialized methods requisite to the modern way of, and scale of, life.

To put it slightly differently, the "I" is never an objectified being, but intrinsically a subject defined by feelings and thoughts, rather than by physical nature. Descartes defined being by this subjectivity, not by objective & physical reality. We have souls, but do others? Do animals? The farther one gets from the self, the less possible it is to feel for the other, the less intersubjective one tends to be. As a child it is jarring to realize that our bones can be broken, elbows scraped, and that our bodies are seen as objects by the medical profession, among others. Is the subjectivity of the "I" an illusion, or is the objectivity of the body?

But even within our own species, we clearly have ways to limit empathy, demonizing others by whatever social construct as opponent groups, nations, races, and as less than human. One shudders to think of the cruelties that were once routine, like children torturing cats, heretics burned at the stake, prisoners drawn and quartered, etc. The catalog is astonishing and disturbing. ISIS seems to be continuing in traditional fashion, though we certainly did our bit during the reign of George W. Bush.

Sure, we are programmed genetically (morally) to feel for our brethren and hate our foes. The science of human empathy has advanced markedly of late, and finds many ways by which we are genetically programmed to feel for those close to us. Yet others, including animals, have feelings just as we do. Their subjective existence is no different from ours in kind or value. Our programming against universal empathy is thus illogical, and arises purely from the competitive necessity by which we must at some point summon the ruthlessness to dispossess others of what they have so that we can prosper in their place. Sometimes by taking their land, sometimes by eating them.

This is the mystifying aspect of our love of competition, such as sports. Granted, sports might be better than war, but the valorization of such anti-social aspects of ourselves, where winning is everything, and legions of losers must suffer defeat so that one champion can be crowned ... it seems morally suspect, at least. If one looks askance at Donald Tump's demonization of Mexican immigrants, one can hardly in the next moment cheer on one's team to crush its opponents, one's country to win its wars, and one's family to succeed in its dreams of professional and reproductive dominance over other people. Competitiveness is all of a piece, and is a moral disaster.

What does competitiveness get us beyond our narrow interests? By way of natural selection, it gets us more successful populations where the weak are culled out and the most ruthless, strong, and clever survive to create yet more successful progeny. And is that the world we want to build, as humanity reaches gargantuan proportions of population and success on Earth? Our success vis-à-vis the rest of the biosphere is painfully evident. We have no competitors but each other. What does success against each other then mean, other than pain and waste?

In the economic system we have devised for ourselves to share out scarce resources, competition is supposed to generate innovation and efficiency. But typically, real innovation comes more from individual inspiration and from government funded research, with the business system merely implementing and applying what others have found, bringing it to a market scale. That is not unimportant work, and the basic market mechanisms that distribute goods are indeed very effective. But it is a principle that can be taken way too far, invading our human values and common cultural projects.

That is the subtext of our cultural moment grappling with inequality, conservatism, and a GOP that has escaped earthly bounds into an ideology of extreme competitiveness that dare not speak its full name. The 1% are, by capitalist definition, the most successful of the species. By conservative, competitive principles, they (exemplified by Donald Trump and Mitt Romney) have the duty and right to shape the social system to perpetuate their own kind at the expense of the lesser competitors among us (technically, losers). Yet there is a democracy to think about, so lip service is paid to propsperity for all, possibly through tax cuts for the rich, possibly through cutting social spending on the poor. But such hypocrisies may not even be needed as the culture becomes inured to a new feudalism, with its ever-hardening social hierarchy.

What is the answer, other than the cultivation of unifying cultural themes, and the critique of divisive, competitive, and unfeeling ones? As the black lives matter movement has brought to consciousness, there are very deep levels of social construction and competition in our society that need ongoing critique and inner work. I think that as part of the work of expanding our field of empathy among fellow humans and other beings, it is useful to see ourselves as an other as well.

Darwin took the first great leap in this direction, taking humans down from a metaphysical singularity and back into the family of life. To realize that we are apes, that we are no more feeling than other organisms that fight tenaciously to live in their own way, and that, considering our own workings as organisms, we have so very little insight that we have no personal idea how our organs work, how our very mind works, that we are strangers in a strange land. Programmed, yes, to feel that our feelings take precedence over all else and all others, but maybe capable of feeling a commonality of mystery and empathy as well.

• Jeb! and the disaster that is mainstream Republicanism.
• The ultimate form of capitalist debt and peonage ... human capital contracts. Why not sell your first-born at birth to the corporations and be done with it?
• Saudis educating children...
• Political polarization is another bad consequence of economic inequality, since money and democracy want different things.
• Australia's internet speed is even worse than ours ... another failure of conservatism.
• A better bus system might be better than chimerical trains.
• Bill Black on DOJ, closing the barn door seven years after the horses left.
• An agenda to address economic inequality. Missing are a financial transaction tax and wealth taxes, such as Piketty's annual wealth tax, or a much higher estate tax.
• Housing shortages increase inequality and feed the rentier class.
• Saving appearances in the Wall Street Journal: "Bush Wants Fewer Tax Breaks for Wealthy Than Most in GOP."

Spock and the Next Myth

From monomyth to polymyth. Double-header reviews of "The Origins of the World's Mythologies", by E.J. Michael Witzel, and "I am Spock", by Leonard Nimoy. 

Myths are essential. They organize our world with purposeful, dramatic meaning, and situate us in a cosmos that is otherwise utterly mystifying and inhuman. All cultures have them, and the weakness of a cultural myth, such as that of late Rome, indicates lack of confidence and can lead to general malaise and decline. Where are we on this spectrum? It is hard to say, but the bulldozing confidence of Indian extermination, manifest destiny, and saving-the-world-through-democracy seems to have slacked off in recent decades. We have settled the frontiers, won the cold war, and possess an unwieldy world-wide empire which is as ungrateful as it is costly.

Our myths / ideologies of progress and unlimited human potential are met at every turn with stark limits, whether in the form of stunningly regressive religious ideologies from the world of Islam, which have fired the imaginations of millions in revolt against our neocolonial domination, or in the form of CO2, which tells us that our profligate ways can not continue without turning Earth into a wasteland. What next?

Before we get to that, it is good to ask what has led to this point: the history of human myths. Eminent scholar Michael Witzel has written a tome on the subject, a vast attempt to put human myths world-wide into a system of lineal evolutionary relationships that go back 50,000, even 100,00 years, to the origins of modern humans, more or less. Quixotic? Quite. Turgid? Totally. In fact, this is a poorly written book that is chaotically disorganized, repetitive, and keeps putting the cart of theory ahead of the horse of evidence. The theory, basically, is that there are common threads of myth (a remote high god, a golden age in the past, and a flood that punished humanity) that traces back lineally to the beginnings of modern human consciousness. This collection of themes was substantially elaborated in all descendent cultures, and especially so in a subset of northern cultures that covered the Indoeuropean, East Asian, and North American regions, to a full story line from creation to apocalyptic destruction, which we know so well in the Bible and other sources.

The theory is obviously full of holes and exceptions at every turn, and I ended up siding with the much-disparaged Jungian counter-view that stories like these are more or less spontaneous and heavily anthropomorphic emanations from human psychology, uniting universal questions with archetypal answers. The completeness of one's story line may have more to do with the local cognitive and organizational gestalt than with thousands of years of lineal descent, notwithstanding the sometimes remarkable durability and accuracy of oral traditions.

It is interesting to note that the putatively more primitive (what Witzel names Gondwana) mythical themes seem more relevant to human meaning, as they tend to be more animistic, very landscape-focused, ancestor-focused, and transactional. The other lineage in Witzel's system (the Laurasian) is more hierarchical, filled with generations of gods, complex and colorful relations between them, plus the stories of Prometheus and original sin, but posits few interactions between contemporary humans and the cosmos. It seems, frankly, more concerned with supporting a temporal hierarchy of king and nobility than with filling the world at large with personally significant meaning.

At any rate, however ancient these myths are, they no longer function for most people in the developed world (putting aside for the moment the continuing social hold of organized religions on billions of people, who may not consciously realize or participate in the ancient and absurd nature of the implicit cosmologies, the fictional heros, or the drama of human sacrifice in the chalice, etc). Our modern cosmos is definitely not that of the scriptures, and nor is our spiritual or moral universe. Through the enlightenment, all this was gradually discarded in favor of true stories, and in return we gained the immense confidence that such revolutionary factuality bestowed, having, in essence, escaped from Plato's cave- from the murk of fantastical fictions into the sunshine of reality, and the immense technological powers that this reality turned out to harbor.

Does all that mean that myth is now dispensible? Not at all. While we have dispensed with the various fairy tales received as myth through the ages, (which, in fairness, many cultures, like the far northern Inuit, treat in very playful fashion rather than the reified & doomed earnestness common among the reigning monotheisms), the function of myth goes well beyond a factual reporting of our past. That origin story has been replaced with a new, and durable reality. What we have subsisted on, ideologically, since the enlightenment, has been the myth / ideology of progress, because the reality we discovered was even more magical than the classical myths had foretold. The elegance and vastness of the real cosmos, from the tiniest particle to the big bang, is more astonishing. And the utility of fossil carbon, nuclear power, electricity, silicon circuits, and the countless other secrets that have been revealed have multiplied our powers, not to mention our populations, many, many times over.

Yet where is the meaning? If all our powers merely serve to satisfy greed, which turns out to be bottomless, what have we gained? Prosperity does seem to have some positive moral effects, making people more secure, less violent, and more capable of caring for others (up to a point). But if one looks closely at traditional cultures, one sees great and deep happiness there as well. It is not at all clear that our hugely wasteful, hive-like societies are optimal on ethical, social, or spiritual levels.

I think we are seeking a new myth, or myths. The last time there was such ferment and seeking was the axial age, which capped an epoch of great human progress to give us our current, if relic, organized religions. What will the current age provide? It remains very difficult to say, since one key property of a myth / ideology is that it is fictive. It is a construction that provides confidence and meaning without recourse to facts, though at the same time, it is hopefully not antagonistic to the appreciation of true stories about reality. Patriotism is a common example. Everyone can be patriotic and love their country, yet every country is not better than every other one.

One one level, we are bombarded with what might be called micro-myths, from books, movies and TV shows. Most are mere stories, not rising to the level of comprehensive narrative about our past, relations with the world, and most importantly, our future. The products out of Hollywood are becoming ever more simple and formulaic, with their comic book characters. Which might make them increasingly mythical, if they weren't so dedicated to only one facet of the cultural myth: the hero tale, reminiscent of works like the Ramayana.

A much-loved example of a more complete myth is that of Star Trek. The recent death of Leonard Nimoy provided an occasion to watch some eposodes and read his (second) autobiography, "I am Spock". Which is a wonderful book, filled with warmth and insight. Nimoy not only portrayed Spock in the original series and the string of films, but directed two of the films, had a wide-ranging career in other acting and directing roles, and made countless appearances, among other more or less successful projects.

He speaks with great nostalgia and appreciation of the role. While Nimoy is surely more than just Spock, Spock is in turn far, far more than Nimoy was, created, or bargained for. Star Trek, and its science officer particularly, created a modern myth of continued human progress, with high ethics and integrity, intrinsic diversity, and (weekly) adventure devoted to searching through that complex reality that surrounds us, bringing peace and reason in equal measure. (Was Spock a Christ-like alien being brought to the Federation via his human mother to redeem mankind through logic? The mind reels!)

It spoke volumes to its own time, and just as strongly to ours. Exploration doesn't have to happen in the outer world of aliens and M-class planets. It can be questions of basic science or forays into the inner worlds psychology, conducted scientifically or artistically. And it includes a dedication to solving the big problems with everything we can muster, particularly reason and logic: climate change, social justice, economic prosperity. The metaphor is quite general, and we can all be in on the adventure.

The one thing we can't do is travel to other star systems. The warp drive that the show is based on physically impossible, so the myth remains firmly fictional in that critical respect. Whether there are dramatic and intelligent beings in other star systems may also remain unknown. In theory, there must be many other civilizations around the galaxy, let alone the universe. But detecting them seems only remotely plausible, and interacting with them, frankly impossible. Still, using some modest artistic license to reveal human ideals and possibilities is a far cry from the monotheistic myths which not only posit, but demand, belief in a vast conspiracy & hierarchy of spirits and other supernatural phenomena as clearly dredged from our psychological makeup as they are scientifically unbelievable.

This is a bridge that we crossed, intellectually, with the enlightenment. Gone are the days when everyone had to believe the same thing, and draw meaning from the same wholly crazy story. Because no myth fully answers each person's questions and perspective. The answer is that we live and will continue to live in a world of many myths, a polymythic culture, and should be quite wary of a single myth returning to dominate. America is particularly diverse, which is reflected in a wildly divergent zoo of cultural myths, from the die-hard son of the Confederacy to the roccoco sexuality of of hip-hop. Start Trek is only one myth of a great variety, one that resonates with many, with positive humanism at its core.

• Ten feet of sea level rise? What shall we do?
• Hilary Hahn, on her violinistic upbringing.
• Samuelson back in the 50's: ... Fiscal policy, meaning changes in taxes and government spending, were the way to deal with the business cycle. The Bureau of the Budget could manage the economy to good effect.  He did not mention the Federal Reserve Board.
• Krugman: "My guess is that euro exit will still prove necessary."
• Policing in South Carolina. No cause for stop, no cause for arrest, no cause for death.
• And what is a "lawful order"?
• A carbon tax is needed: we can never rely on supplies becoming scarce. Or on new tech being cheaper than coal.
• A transaction tax is finally on the table.
• Trains are five to ten fold less carbon-emitting than planes.

Atheists Have No Morals

A "truth" one comes up against all the time. And what are morals, anyhow?

You hear it all the time, as an atheist. "How can you be moral if you don't believe in anything?" Or some variation, perhaps citing Nietzsche in more sophisticated versions. It is an earnest enough question, given the life-long indoctrination that religions practice, and the dependence- intellectual, social, and moral- they foster.

In large part it is a tribal badge, this conviction that we are the good ones and the others are not good. Without even looking into the particulars of a community's moral code, one can assume that they view theirs as good, and those of outsiders as deficient if not evil. Even the mob has its code of honor. Religious community membership commonly functions as a social signal of trustworthiness, of goodness, good intentions, and proper upbringing. It was not long ago that everyone had to be a member of a local church, or the national church, or was shunned. The Muslim world exemplifies this tendency, currently.

In that it does not differ much from nationalism, or membership in any other club, masonic order, Elks lodge, etc. But religions claim much more. The typical religion not only forms a social club, but to validate its existence and inflate its importance, claims to know mysteries of which the lay bumpkin is ignorant- the nature of the cosmos, the ultimate reality, and the desires of god. It offers cosmic as well as personal transcendence, and offers an objective moral order. This is the rock on which believers lay their bigotry, that they have answers to moral questions which for the atheist have no answers, leading presumably to despair at best, murder at worst.

This moral order has been under continuous renovation from time immemorial, but that doesn't keep theologians from claiming that it is objective and absolute, thus giving them the power to conflate what supposedly is (what god wants) into what you should do. God said X, therefore you must do X. Only, so much scripture has piled up in the mean time, so full of conflicts and ambiguity that there is simply no way to a clear interpretation. On the one hand, this means that all fundamentalisms are doomed to be just as subjective and self-serving as the modernist / deviationist interpreters, and on the other hand, it means that the devout need the services of some interpreter, to render fatwas out of the thicket of their so-called objective text.

So it is not really objective after all, and one empathetic judge or practitioner can do more for her flock than gaggle of rule-divining theologians. But wait, isn't the mere proposition of an objective moral order worth something, and better than the utter nihilism of atheism? Isn't the dedication to seeking moral truths, however far we are from discerning or attaining them, one key point of religious engagement and a noble quest that separates us from the brutish, thoughtless, care-less atheists? And even if the moral order is ambiguous, isn't the promise of a deity who sees all and judges all a prod to good behavior?

Well, those are fascinating questions. If one doesn't really know what is good in a reliable, clear way, however, it hardly seems helpful to have an eye of Sauron watching our every move, or the promise of eternal suffering if we take a wrong step. Theologians themselves are all over the map on the reality of hell and the nature of posthumous justice. The Catholic church recently excused babies from their stay in purgatory, after centuries of selling indulgences and demanding pennance of endless varieties from its adherents to get their loved ones out of it. The fact of the matter is that we behave as if our conscience is our final judge, whatever our theological commitments. It is our conscience that is the field of moral battle, whether it is cultivated by a program of guilt and self-hatred, one of compassion and calm introspection, or one of empathy with other living beings of all kinds including humans.

More interesting is the question of the quest for moral laws. Our legal systems are always straining to make their apparatus and judgements seem as objective as possible. Guilty! Innocent! The lure of certainty seems to be a strong feature of human nature, and this illusion is surely of practical benefit to our systems of communal judgement. A cautionary example can be seen in the sorry state of our Supreme Court, which has, though its nakedly ideological bickering and party-line decisions, ceded any claim, even illusory, to objective, above-the-fray judgement.

So each religious tradition toils on, seeking that final, absolute moral object that will tell its children to go to bed on time and to turn off their cell phones. And the kicker is that they phrase this as finding out "what god wants", as if unloading all the ethical work to someone else elevates our moral nature. As you can probably tell, I regard this as quixotic at best, for our morals are very much ours, and are fundamentally subjective and biological. Had we no empathy for our fellow creatures, all would be lost, whatever the absolute moral code. Conversely, the person who cares for others and expands her sympathies to the largest possible extent has no need of theological commandments.

So seeking for objective morals is a fool's errand. But that doesn't mean that there is no room for serious moral inquiry, particularly that premised on things that are real, like the existence, needs, and desires of others and our many levels of individual and communal interest. It is complicated enough without invoking unseen phantasms.

Which brings us back to the atheist. Once one understands that there is no moral high ground for those who pound on bibles or cart about granite slabs inscribed with the ten commandments, and that communities will typically grant themselves moral superiority whatever the content of their codes and practices, (one is reminded of the extensive forgiveness the Catholic church lavished on its wayward priests), one is left on a much more even playing field.

Religious people are often perplexed by the apparent uprightness of atheists. They seem to be smart, well-behaved, oddly capable of putting up a good front and not getting into trouble. What could be going on? Statistics of course reinforce that impression. Atheists are indeed better-behaved than religious people, staying married longer, murdering less, having fewer abortions, committing less crime, etc. Truly, a conundrum.

It almost seems as though attentiveness to reality, not only in the form of science, evolution, and similar nerd-ish fixations which lead many atheists to their philosophy, but in the forms of civic affairs, politics, history, and psychology- attentiveness in short, to other people- might form a sounder moral education than indoctrination in some crazy story about master beings, resurrections, perfect scriptures, and eternal life. The humanist viewpoint (which is the general atheist position) may not have the plotline and passion of dramatic religions, but that may be a point in its favor. While religions often foster the best in humanity, they frequently seem to go astray, whether due to inattention in the face of the distracting, even overwhelming, story they carry, or directly from some part or interpretation of that story that gives official license to violate the most basic elements of human morality. The Israel-Palestine conundrum comes to mind.

When pressed, a religious person may offer that, sure, given the culture we have inherited, most atheists still manage to do alright, but this comes from the solid grounding that Christianity has given the West (insert culture and religion of choice here). At some point, if religion continues to decline and our cultures lose this moral anchor, there is no telling what might happen. Even those idyllic quasi-socialist countries of Scandinavia that are the most secular in the world still have state churches and their rich moral patrimony.

This gets the correlation all wrong, however. It is the most religious countries that are the most backward, and the least that are socially more just, with lower crime, incarceration, etc. If religion were having all these salutary effects, why aren't the most religious countries the happiest, and the least most ridden with crime and immorality? But we see the exact opposite. It is almost as though religion is a counter-reality coping mechanism that is most attractive in countries mired in poverty and corruption, if not causing poverty and corruption. And that it seems to be unnecessary in effectively atheist countries like Luxembourg, Norway, and Denmark, either personally to help people survive adverse conditions, or communally to foster good behavior.

Additionally, one should realize that in the West, Christianity had over a millenium of free reign during the Dark and Medieval Ages. Much good was done, but I think on balance, the moral tenor of the West has increased considerably since that time, in the wake of the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightnment that generated secular concepts like fundamental human equality, human rights, democratic government, rationalism in public policy as well as scientific investigation, and much more. As ideals, they owe quite a bit to the preceeding religious conceptions, but were remade on a secular basis that made them far more effective, as it was the church itself that was a significant source of oppression, corruption, and obscurantism. We have gone to far greater moral heights in the modern age than were ever achieved previously, even while we grapple with enormous problems of scientific & political success. There were several horrible atheist movements and governments in the 20th century, which must be noted, but which have thankfully each been substantially reformed if not eliminated. Each could be seen as a religious movement of an idealistic, fanatical sort, at least in sociological, if not theological, terms.

Lastly, what of personal spirituality? Even if religions make people no more moral, empirically, than other philosophies, and even if they are factually false, and even if theology is a parody of scholarship, isn't the personal resonance with our surroundings, deep questioning, and quest for some kind of transcendence a significant feature of humanity, and of human morality?

I would actually agree with that, with some caveats, since the atheist is, in reality, just as spiritual as the religious person. The problem is whether one indulges this innate impulse with inferred pseudoscience and systems of social control based on hosts of invisible beings. The wonders of nature remain wonderous whether one chalks them up to deities or not. Religion is an *example of humans yearning for understanding and meaning, but is far from the apotheosis or sole source of meaning, let alone legibility for understanding the world. It is healthy for people to share their spiritual questions, insights, and commitments with each other, which is why not just religions, but academies, libraries and universities were invented. Here is where love- for spirituality is really the love of life and the world around us- is exercised as the freedom to be interested in and draw meaning from ... other people, phenomena of nature, arts and self-expression, and the best thinking that humanity has to offer.

This is transcendence with discipline, making of ourselves better beings, morally as well as intellectually. The idea of getting on the good side of an invisible being, or counting on another life better than this one, if such theories are not well-founded, seems a little cheap in comparison to humble dedication to slow betterment in & of this life.

• Annals of religious BS. Being personally related to god prevents drug abuse: "We have multiple ways of knowing: we have intuition, we have rigorous logic, we have investigation. We need to use them all. They’re all important, valid forms of perception."
• Annals of really serious religious BS.
• Some people call it mystery, others call it BS.
• Annals of denial: rise of the "nones" = culling of those "pretend Christians".
• Atheism is on the rise in the Middle East.
• Keeping tabs on Syria. And Iraq.
• On being wrong, and being really, really wrong.
• Virtually any existing condition is "Pareto optimal".
• Climate action is needed immediately.
• Happiness is an institutional, social issue.
• Banks are too big, and we can make them smaller.
• What is the problem with Keynes? Just imagine if government worked consistently against economic feudalism instead of for it.
• Were the founding fathers Keynesians?
• Finally, a church I can relate to.

Epiphany Without a Cause: a Theory of Religion

Similarities between the near-death-experience, enlightenment, "spirituality", motivation, and the common core of religion.

I recently commented on near death experiences (NDEs), which have some very interesting characteristics. They are incredibly compelling, prompting both life changes in the person experiencing them, and gushing descriptions like "realer than real". They are highly emotional, typically positive, but sometimes negative. The subject feels love pervading the universe, and that this is knowlege which is not only true, but needs to be spread around to other people. But the experience is also vague, with a feeling of tremendous knowledge being gained, but an actuality of platitude after platitude, set in very stock archetypal images- angels, bright lights, butterflies, voices of god, telepathy, clouds.

Does this all sound familiar? It does to me. While one might take it, on the one hand, as evidence that religions are true in what they communicate, at least in some broad sense of a deep / alternate reality and motivation that unites them all, one might take it more skeptically as being a key to what makes humans so susceptible to religion and forms its internal wellspring, without being what it purports on its face.

But what is the point of such a mechanism, if we assume it is natural and biological, rather than a transmission from the beyond? The NDE may be the extreme form, by way of brain disconnection between areas that normally keep each other in check, of our normal positive motivational gestalt. As one is walking along, one occasionally reads into the landscape pleasant sensations- trees growing and birds singing, and more rarely, internal realizations and epiphanies of various kinds. We only know about some nice impression or great idea by way of an emotional reaction that wells up telling us that beauty or truth are at hand- that some nagging question has been solved, or some new perspective gained.

We must have a positive emotional system that is not simply the well-known, purely emotional reward system of drug addiction, but one that is more cognitively engaged, which labels our ideas and impressions with emotional valence and meaning. One might call it a key part of our imaginations. Untethered from inputs and more importantly, from its customary repression by normal cortical controls that harness it to only real, (or realistic) ideas, it might both gain intensity, and resort to dredging up archetypal dream-imagery for attachment.

Some partial form of this process might be at work in great art, and among the mystics of religion. Buddhists devote their lives to forms of meditation that fundamentally seek, I would suggest, to gain this NDE-like state of pure positivity and sense of vast knowledge and emotion, termed Nirvanna. Obviously, it is both extremely hard to attain, and all-to-fleeting when it happens. And it is not really knowledge of any this-world kind at all, merely the sense of knowledge.

This leads to a unifying theory of religion, where the NDE is merely the most intense form of a feeling that happens to everyone at various levels. Typically we seek to intensify this feeling through what are biologically and evolutionarily valid means- the true epiphany regarding a personal task which is indeed useful and oriented to the real world, and which gains us a precious practical advantage. But the lure of this feeling is strong. We can also seek it through what I would call false epiphanies, such as intense meditation, or the typical institutional religious apparatus of scripture, sermon, homilies, hymns, incense, etc. all purporting to vastly more meaning than they actually contain. Latter-day seekers even engage in postmodern philosophy!

This is reminiscent of Stephen Pinker's theory of music as being a kind of cheesecake for the mind. The evolutionary rationale of our capacity to make and appreciate music is not at all clear, but in any case, complex instruments like pianos that demand exquisite talent and dedication, and our unimaginable cultural wealth of composed and performed music, extend far beyond any evolutionary rationale. We are tickling pleasure centers whose original purpose was far more modest- perhaps the identification of a bird, or the seduction of a mate.

In similar fashion, religions seem to tickle a kind of meaning and positivity center in the brain, with more or less empty mantras and practices which yet carry intense meaningfulness. If they can inspire good morality, humility, and pleasant personal and communal feelings, that is wonderful. But religion can also form the nucleus of wider psychological complexes, attracting far darker tendencies like tribalism, magical thinking, superstition, intolerance, fanaticism, and patriarchial oppression, to generate thought and behavior systems that not only far outstrip their warrant, but go beyond all decency.

• A little pushback from the new atheists.
• Religion, violence, and psychological & moral primitivism.
• Religion, power, and Nietzsche.
• Religious morality is the least objective of all.
• Faith is a bad thing, generally.
• C. S. Lewis, revelation, heaven, etc.- uncritically reviewed.
• Greece has not been well-served by austerity. It can not "sink".
• Indoctrination, propaganda, and water-carrying for the 1% ... the war for home schooling.
• Terrorist or hero? You make the call.
• On the perpetuation of social class in the US.
• "Washington [state] now makes low-income families pay seven times the effective tax rate that the rich pay."
• Where does the Fed's free money go, and where should it go?
• Bill Mitchell on neo-feudalism and the degradation of our concept of citizenship.
• Gary Kasparov on the global culture clash, and why modern values are better than the other ones:

"It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these 'time travelers' to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society."

Realer Than Real

A second post on the topic of near death experiences, reviewing "Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander.

Santa Claus climbed down my chimney with a copy of "Proof of Heaven", another in a long line of books about the intense spiritual experiences that people have in many situations, but most frequently when close to death. The case is especially extraordinary in that the author is a practicing and scholarly neurosurgeon, and also in that his experience (NDE for short) was remarkably intense, lengthy, well-recalled, and unimpeded by inputs from the surroundings. There were no episodes of hearing what was actually going on in his room, rather just pure experiences of high and low spiritual engagement, interacting with god, angels, swamps, dark regions, etc.

There is no question that Alexander experienced all this, as he has recorded. The problem is with interpretation. His interpretation is absolute- that he was in contact with another reality, which he frequently describes as "realer than real", and "ultra-real", and that this reality was divine, culminating in god, and that he has an important message to bring back that we are loved, and that every one is important. This reality was outside his brain, and his good news is in part that "we are more than our physical body".

"Each and every one of us is deeply known and cared for by a Creator who cherishes us beyond any ability we have to comprehend. That knowledge must no longer remain a secret."

Alexander had long been an Episcopalian, and evidently an irregular church-goer while at the same time a somewhat religiously skeptical scientist. He is a bit unclear about his allegiences, really, but seems to have been a believer at some level (principally for family purposes, but not for scientific ones), and has spent his life in a church culture as well as in a scientific culture. The NDE dramatically confirmed him in his faith, but one has also to ask whether that long life of faith contributed to the content of, and especially to his interpretation of, the experience.

A good deal of interpretation turns on what various areas of the brain are responsible for, and when they were "off" or "on" during his (outer) coma and (inner) NDE. Alexander was in a coma for a week, and portrays his travels in NDE-land as taking place throughout this time, when his brain (the cortex, as measured by EEG and external responsiveness) was largely not active, by conventional metrics. Yet it is possible that it actually took place in a small portion of this time, say the last half hour before he woke up consciously. I certainly have had the experience of an intense, extensive dream taking place in a very brief time, clock-wise. Similarly, having one's life flash before ones eyes, as the expression has it, typically happens in a very brief clock time, but in a much longer subjective time. In short, our sense of time is another construction of the mind, and thus can not be taken at face value under these conditions.

He had a severe case of bacterial meningitis, from which he concludes that it was almost a perfect trauma for an NDE, debilitating the surface all over his brain, i.e. the cortex or higher functions, and possibly only in a layer-specific way. From this he concludes that none of his NDE experiences are possible by typically understood means, since all consciousness requires cortical functions, for instance for sensations of flying and seeing, hearing, etc. Even imagined and hallucinated experiences require their respective areas of the brain, as far as we know.

"The more I learned of my condition, and the more I sought, using the current scientific literature, to explain what had happened, the more I came up spectacularly short. Everything- the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow- suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work. 

The more I read of the 'scientific' explanations of what NDEs are, themore I was shocked by their flimsiness. And yet I also knew with chagrin that they were exactly the ones that the old 'me' would have pointed to vaguely if someone had asked me to 'expalin' what an NDE is. 

But people who weren't doctors couldn't be expected to know this.
...
Many others have seen that astonishing clarity of mind that often comes to demented elderly people just before they pass on, just as John had seen in his father (A phenomenon known as 'terminal lucidity'). There was no neuroscientific explanation for that."

That is all understandable, but I don't think we can be quite as categorical as he is. For the main issue is that we do not know quite how conciousness, let alone this kind of realer-than-real, trippy consciousness, works, even when clearly due to more mundane causes like LSD. It might well be an interplay between higher and lower brain functions, and it might additionally be that in consciousness, as in so many other aspects of cognitive science, cortical functions generally modulate and especially inhibit more central and primitive areas of the brain. The amygdala is a classic case, where its learning of fearful stimuli is permanent and gives rise to involuntary reactions, yet these can be damped by cognitive learning in higher levels of the brain, thereby keeping the subject on an even keel.

Similarly, one might imagine that some core of conscious awareness happens in the thalamic and lower regions of the brain, and that when the cortical brakes are off, that person might experience something precisely along the lines of the NDE- realer than real, incredibly moving, and patterned by very deep emotional archetypes and images, such as the flying through the air with angelic beings that Alexander experienced, among much else. It might be so moving that the person feels compelled to change his life or write books about it, and speaks of it as a scientific voyage, with great understanding and knowledge gained. But this knowledge boils down to very little in the end: that we are all loved by something. And that love seems, to put it mildly, inert, since people are still living and dying every day in misery, on our surface world. The only love in evidence out here is that which we give to each other.

Alexander is keen to recapture some of this experience, and does so in two ways. First is through greater church attendance. He movingly writes about realizing belatedly that he had not really appreciated the whole church experience, but that he now understands it as trying, in our mundane world, to recapture a glimmer of this spiritual experience, (whatever its interpretation), which some are fortunate enough to have intensely, but that all of us have some degree of appreciation for, accounting for the general celebrity of spiritual adepts, prophets, saints, etc. Second is an adventure into meditation, especially methods that claim to provide much faster achievement of out-of-body experiences than normal techniques provide. One has to ask, however, why repeating the experience is important if the knowledge he had gained was so certain, scientific, explicit, and useful. We don't repeat our greatest experiments in the lab just for the fun of it, typically.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have eternal life and the ability to think outside the brain. Being eternally loved by some tremendous "Om" sounds a little less attractive, but OK. Alexander is understandably convinced by his overwhelming experience and his theological interpretation, but putting tradition & training aside, there is no theoretical reason from biology, computation, or physics, to take all this seriously as evidence of heaven or souls, etc. These are huge hypotheses (given the scientific corpus as it stands) that require different forms of evidence to address, particularly something less obviously subjective and archetypally templated. The weight of tradition may have arisen from a countless number of such mental / spiritual experiences, and if they are misinterpreted as I think they are, the tradition is not pointing us in the right direction, at least in scientific terms. That said, any encouragement we can have to not fear death is a good thing, since this is an important source of our worst characteristics- lack of courage, sentimentality about every reverse and misfortune, etc.

The heaven hypothesis, far from being proven, remains much more a matter of inner, archetypal reality than of any outer "real" reality, even on its own evidence. While it is true that much about the mind remains unexplained by science in its current state, that doesn't demand that vast hypotheses about alternate realities, and the invocation of quantum mechanics in consciousness (yes, Alexander even dabbles in this area) are reasonable, let alone proven. But it is such deep matter, and our consciousness remains such a mystery, both technically and theoretically, that it is understandable that those who go through the gauntlet of this ultimate, compellingly subjective experience would declare it not only real, but realer than real.

• Capitalism is not the only way.
• Stiglitz on credit, rent, and wealth. "It’s also true that people who make the most productive contributions, the ones who make lasers or transistors, or the inventor of the computer, DNA researchers — none of these are the top wealthiest people in the country. So if you look at the people who contributed the most, and the people who are there at the top, they’re not the same."
• Taxes have no effect on work effort.
• Demand-deficient recessions & stagnation are a scandal.
• Is god a proper name, or a form of capitalized cultural oppression?
• Good teachers are critically important.
• Millions of prime age workers are still on the sidelines.
• "We have managed to throw away between 5%-10% of the potential wealth of the North Atlantic, and we appear to have thrown it away permanently."
• "And that is tragic because if Alvin Hansen is right, and I think he is, the gap between these two lines represents an annual loss of output of approximately one trillion dollars."