Author: Bill Blymiller

August 14, 2013 Embrace Apocalypse

Posted on by Bill Blymiller

                 Click here for a pdf version.

We Have to Embrace Apocalypse If We’re Going to Get Serious About Sticking Around on This Planet

Robert Jensen

To think apocalyptically is not to give up on ourselves, but only to give up on the arrogant stories we modern humans have been telling about ourselves.

This is an excerpt from We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out , in print at Amazon.com and
on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013):

Here’s my experience in speaking apocalyptically about the serious challenges humans face: No matter how carefully I craft a statement of concern about the future of humans, no matter how often I deny a claim to special gifts of prognostication, no matter now clearly I reject supernatural explanations or solutions, I can be certain that a significant component of any audience will refuse to take me seriously. Some of those people will make a joke about “Mr. Doom and Gloom.” Others will suggest that such talk is no different than conspiracy theorists’ ramblings about how international bankers, secret cells of communists, or crypto-fascists are using the United Nations to create a one- world government. Even the most measured and careful talk of the coming dramatic change in the place of humans on Earth leads to accusations that one is unnecessarily alarmist, probably paranoid, certainly irrelevant to serious discussion about social and ecological issues. In the United States, talk of the future is expected to be upbeat, predicting expansion and progress, or at least maintenance of our “way of life.”

Apocalyptic thinking allows us to let go of those fanciful visions of the future. As singer/ songwriter John Gorka puts it: “The old future’s gone/We can’t get to there from here.” The comfortable futures that we are comfortable imagining are no longer available to us because of the reckless way we’ve been rolling the dice; there is nothing to save us from ourselves. Our task is to deal with our future without delusions of deliverance, either divine or technological. This planet is not a way station in a journey to some better place [emphasis is mine, this is our history: Settle in use up the environment, move on]; it is our home, the only home we will know. We will make our peace with ourselves, each other, and the larger living world here.

The first step in thinking sensibly about the future, of course, is reviewing the past. The uncertainty of our future will be easier to accept and the strength to persevere will be easier to summon if we recognize:

–We are animals. For all our considerable rational capacities, we are driven by non- rational forces that cannot be fully understood or completely controlled. Even the most careful scientist is largely an emotional creature, just like everyone else.

–We are band/tribal animals. Whatever kind of political unit we live in today, our evolutionary history is in small groups; that’s how we are designed to live.

–We are band/tribal animals living in a global world. The consequences of the past 10,000 years of human history have left us dealing with human problems on a global scale, and with 7 billion people on the planet, there’s no point in fantasizing about a retreat to Eden.

With that history in mind, we should go easy on ourselves. As Wes Jackson said, we are a species out of context, facing the unique task of being the first animals who will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive, reckoning not just with what we do in our specific place on the planet but with what other people are doing around the world. This is no small task, and we are bound to fail often. We may never stop failing, and that is possibly the most daunting challenge we must face: Can we persevere in the quest for justice and sustainability even if we had good reasons to believe that both projects ultimately will fail? Can we live with that possibility? Can we ponder that and yet still commit ourselves to loving action toward others and the non- human world?

Said differently: What if our species is an evolutionary dead end? What if those adaptations that produced our incredible evolutionary success — our ability to understand certain aspects of how the world works and manipulate that world to our short-term advantage — are the very qualities that guarantee our human systems will degrade the life-sustaining systems of the world? What if that which has allowed us to dominate will be that which destroys us? What if humanity’s story is a dramatic tragedy in the classical sense, a tale in which the seeds of the hero’s destruction are to be found within, and history is the unfolding of the inevitable fall?

We love stories of individual heroes, and collectively we tend to think of ourselves as the heroic species. The question we might ask, uncomfortably, about those tales of heroism: Is Homo sapiens an epic hero or a tragic one? Literature scholars argue over the specific definitions of the terms “epic” and “tragedy,” but in common usage an epic celebrates the deeds of a hero who is favored by, and perhaps descended from, the gods. These heroes overcome adversity to do great things in the service of great causes. Epic heroes win.

A tragic hero loses, but typically not because of an external force. The essence of tragedy is what Aristotle called “hamartia,” an error in judgment made because of some character flaw, such as hubris. That excessive pride of protagonists becomes their downfall. Although some traditions talk about the sin of pride, most of us understand that taking some pride in ourselves is psychologically healthy. The problem is excessive pride, when we elevate ourselves and lose a sense of the equal value of others. When we fall into hubris individually, the consequences can be disastrous for us and those around us. When we fall into that hubris as a species — when we ignore the consequences of the exploitation on which our “lifestyle” is based — the consequences are more dramatic.

What if our task is to give up the dream of the human species as special? And what if the global forces set in motion during the high-energy/high-technology era are beyond the point of no return? Surrounded by the big majestic buildings and tiny sophisticated electronic gadgets created through human cleverness, it’s easy for us to believe we are smart enough to run a complex world. But cleverness is not wisdom, and the ability to create does not guarantee we can control the destruction we have unleashed. It may be that there is no way to rewrite this larger epic, that too much of the tragedy has already been played out.

But here’s the good news: While tragic heroes meet an unhappy fate, a community can learn from the protagonist’s fall. Even tragic heroes can, at the end, celebrate the dignity of the human spirit in their failure. That may be our task, to recognize that we can’t reverse course in time to prevent our ultimate failure, but that in the time remaining we can recognize our hamartia, name our hubris, and do what we can to undo the damage.

That may be the one chance for us to be truly heroic, by learning to leave center stage gracefully, to stop trying to run the world and to accept a place in the world. We have to take our lives seriously but take Life more seriously.

We certainly live in a dangerous time, if we take seriously the data that our vast intellectual enterprises have produced. Ironically, the majority of intellectuals who are part of those enterprises prefer to ignore the implications of that data. The reasons for that will of course vary, and there is no reason to pretend these issues are simple or that we can line up intellectuals in simple categories of good/bad, brave/cowardly, honest/ dishonest. Reasonable people can agree on the data and disagree on interpretation and analysis. Again, my argument is not that anyone who does not share my interpretation and analysis is obviously wrong or corrupt; many of the assertions I have made require more lengthy argument than available in this space.

But I hold to one point without equivocation: When the privileged intellectuals subsidized by the institutions of the dominant culture look away from the difficult issues that we face today, they are failing to meet their moral obligations. The more privileged the intellectual, the greater the responsibility to use our resources, status, and autonomy to face these issues. There is a lot riding on whether we have the courage and the strength to accept that danger, joyfully. This harsh assessment, and the grief that must accompany it, is not a rejection of joy. The two, grief and joy, are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, rely on each other, and define the human condition. As Wendell Berry puts it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy.”

This inevitably leads to the question: where can we find hope? My short answer: Don’t ask someone else where to find it. Create it through your actions. Hope is not something we find, but is something we earn. No one has the right to be hopeful until they expend energy to make hope possible. Gorka’s song expresses this: “The old future’s dead and gone/Never to return/There’s a new way through the hills ahead/This one we’ll have to earn/This one we’ll have to earn.”

Berry speaks repeatedly of the importance of daily practice, of building a better world in a practical ways that nurture real bonds in real communities that know their place in the world. He applies this same idea to a discussion of hope: [Y]ou’re not under any obligation to construct a hope for the whole human race. What you are required to do is to be intelligent. And that means you’ve got to have an array of examples you want more or less to understand. Some are not perfect, and others are awful, and to be intelligent you’ve got to know why some are better than the others.

If people demand that intellectuals provide hope — or, worse, if intellectuals believe it is their job to give people hope — then offering platitudes about hope is just another way of avoiding the difficult questions. Clamoring for hope can be a dangerous diversion. But if the discussion of hope leads to action, even in the face of situations that may be hopeless, then we can hold onto what Albert Camus called a “stubborn hope”: Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope.

I would call this a hope beyond hope, the willingness not only to embrace that danger but to find joy in it. The systems that structure our world have done more damage than we can understand, but no matter how dark the world grows, there is a light within. That is the message of the best of our theological and secular philosophical traditions, a recurring theme of the best of our art. Wendell Berry has been returning to this theme for decades in essays, fiction, and poetry, and it is the subject of one of his Sabbath poems:

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction any more than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

This is what I say to myself: Whatever our chances of surviving, we define ourselves in the present moment by what we do. There are two basic tasks in front of us. First, we should commit some of our energy to movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, especially those of us with the privilege that is rooted in that injustice. As a middle-class American white man, I can see plenty of places to continue working, in movements dedicated to ending white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and U.S. wars of domination.

I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future that we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We all have to develop the skills needed for that world (such as farming and gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes, and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning. We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our connection to others, and our place in nature. The stories we tell will matter, as will the skills we learn.

Berry’s basis for hope begins with a recognition of where we are and who we are, at our best:

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot. Be lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you, which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

In my own life, I continue to work on those questions of justice in existing movements, but I have shifted a considerable amount of time to helping build local networks that can create a place for those experiments. Different people will move toward different efforts depending on talents and temperaments; we should all follow our hearts and minds to apply ourselves where it makes sense, given who we are and where we live. After offering several warnings about arrogance, I’m not about to suggest I know best what work other people should do. If there is any reason for hope, it will be in direct proportion to our capacity for humility and seeing ourselves as part of, not on top of, the larger living world. Berry ends that Sabbath poem not with false optimism but a blunt reminder of how easy it is for us to fall out of right relation with ourselves, others, and the larger living world:

No place at last is better than the world. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.

The argument I have made rests on an unsentimental assessment of the physical world and the life-threatening consequences of human activity over the past 10,000 years. We would be wise not to plan on supernatural forces or human inventions to save us from ourselves. It is unlikely that we will be delivered to a promised land by divine or technological intervention. Wishing the world were less harsh will not magically make it less harsh. We should not give into the temptation to believe in magic. As James Howard Kunstler puts it, we should stop “clamoring desperately for rescue remedies that would allow them to continue living exactly the way they were used to living, with all the accustomed comforts.”

But we should keep telling stories. Our stories do not change the physical world, but they have the potential to change us. In that sense, the poet Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

Whatever particular work intellectuals do, they are also storytellers. Artists tell stories, but so do scientists and engineers, teachers and preachers. Our work is always both embedded in a story and advancing a story. Intellectual work matters not just for what it discovers about how the world works, but for what story it tells about those discoveries.

To think apocalyptically is not to give up on ourselves, but only to give up on the arrogant stories we modern humans have been telling about ourselves. Our hope for a decent future — indeed, any hope for even the idea of a future — depends on our ability to tell stories not of how humans have ruled the world but how we can live in the world. The royal must give way to the prophetic and the apocalyptic. The central story of power — that the domination/subordination dynamic is natural and inevitable — must give way to stories of dignity, solidarity, equality. We must resist not only the cruelty of repression but the seduction of comfort.

The songs we sing matter at least as much as the machines we build. Power always assumes it can control. Our task is to resist that control. Gorka offers that reminder, of the latent power of our stories, in the fancifully titled song “Flying Red Horse”:

They think they can tame you, name you and frame you, Aim you where you don’t belong.
They know where you’ve been but not where you’re going, And that is the source of the songs.

 

July 24, 2013 Racist Profiling

Posted on by Bill Blymiller

                                                                                                                                                                                  Click here for a pdf version.

The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling

Ta-Nehisi Coates      Jul 17 2013, 7:00 AM ET, The Atlantic

Yesterday Richard Cohen wrote this:

“In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.

Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I wish I had a solution to this problem. If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.”

It is very important to understand that no one is asking the NYPD to “ignore race.” If an officer is looking for an specific suspect, no one would ask that the NYPD not include race as part of the description. But “Stop And Frisk” is not concerned with specific suspects, but with a broad class of people who are observed making “furtive movements.”

With that said, we should take a moment to appreciate the import of Cohen’s words. They hold that neither I, nor my twelve year old son, nor any of my nephews, nor any of my male family members deserve to be judged as individuals by the state. Instead we must be seen as members of a class more inclined to criminality. It does not matter that the vast, vast majority of black men commit no violent crime at all. Cohen argues that that majority should unduly bear the burden of police invasion, because of a minority who happens to live among us.

Richard Cohen concedes that this is a violation, but it is one he believes black people, for the good of their country, must learn to live with. Effectively he is arguing for a kind of racist public safety tax. The tax may, or may not, end with a frisking. More contact with the police, and people who want to be police, necessarily means more deadly tragedy. Thus Cohen is not simply calling for my son and I to bear the brunt of “violation,” he is calling for us to run a higher risk of death and serious injury at the hands of the state. Effectively he is calling for Sean Bell’s fianceé, Trayvon Martin’s parents, Amadou Diallo’s mother, Prince Jones’ daughter, the relatives of Kathryn Johnston to accept the deaths of their love ones as the price of doing business in America.

The unspoken premise here is chilling — the annihilation of the black individual. To wit:

“Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.”

I think we would concede that it would be wrong of me to assume that every Jewish person I meet is good at chess, physics or medicine. This year I am working at MIT where a disproportionate number of the students are Asian-Americans. It would be no more wise for me to take from that experience that individual Asian-Americans are good at math, then it would be for anyone to look at the NBA and assume I am good at basketball. And we would agree with this because generally hold that people deserve to be seen as individuals. But by Cohen’s logic, the fact of being an African-American is an exception to this.

Perhaps the standards should be different when it comes to public safety and violence. But New York City’s murder rate is as low as it has been in 50 years. How long should a racist public-safety tax last? Until black people no longer constitute a disproportionate share of our violent criminals, one assumes. But black people do not constitute such a group — victims of hundreds of years of racist state policy constitute that group. “Black on Black” crime is the racecraft by which the fact of what was done to us disappears, and the fact of our DNA becomes criminalized.

I think Richard Cohen knows this:

“The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.”

This paragraph is the American approach to racism in brief. Cohen can name the root causes. He is not blind to history. But he can not countenance the import of his own words. So he retreats to cynicism, pronouncing the American state to bankrupt to clean up a problem which it created, and, by an act of magic, lays it at the feet of something called “culture.”

To paraphrase the old Sidney Harris cartoon, the formula for weak-sauce goes something like this

(Forced Labor + Mass Rape)  AUCTIONING YOUR CHILDREN
+ (Poll tax + Segregation + Grandfather clause)  THE KLAN
+ (Redlining + Blockbusting + Race Riots)  CUTTING YOU OUT OF THE NEW DEAL
–  THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS
= “Meh, you figure it out.”

An capricious anti-intellectualism, a fanatical imbecility, a willful amnesia, an eternal sunshine upon our spotless minds, is white supremacy’s gravest legacy. You would not know from reading Richard Cohen that the idea that blacks are more criminally prone, is older than the crime stats we cite, that it has been cited since America’s founding to justify the very kinds of public safety measures Cohen now endorses. Black criminality is more than myth; it is socially engineered prophecy. If you believe a people to be inhuman, you confine them to inhuman quarters and inhuman labor, and subject them to inhuman policy. When they then behave inhumanely to each other, you take it is as proof of your original thesis. The game is rigged. Because it must be.

You should not be deluded into thinking Richard Cohen an outlier. The most prominent advocate of profiling our current pariah classes — black people and Muslim Americans — is now being mentioned in conversations to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Those mentions received an endorsement from our president:

Kelly hasn’t spoken about whether he wants the post, but in an interview with Univision, the president said he’d want to know if Kelly was considering a job change.

“Ray Kelly’s obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” Obama said. “And the federal government partners a lot with New York, because obviously, our concerns about terrorism often times are focused on big-city targets, and I think Ray Kelly’s one of the best there is.

What you must understand is that when the individual lives of those freighted by racism are deemed less than those who are not, all other inhumanities follow. That is the logic of Richard Cohen. It is the logic of Barack Obama’s potential head of the DHS. This logic is not new, original or especially egregious. It is the logic of the country’s largest city. It is the logic of the American state. It is the logic scribbled across the lion’s share of our history. And it is the logic that killed Trayvon Martin.

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Comments:
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Josh Jasper

When I was living in Singapore, I was in the minority as a white person, but when a white person committed a crime, white teens were not pulled over and harassed by the police. Were they were doing it wrong? Of course not. No white American living anywhere outside the US would tolerate being treated the way our police treat black people.

Cohen’s argument is easily demolished, and has a clear core of white supremacy.

Cohen has won 4 Pulitzer Prizes. My mind stops after that fact. I can go no further. I’m lost.

Avatar

I lived in South Africa for about two years and experienced some pretty terrifying official harassment. While on holiday in Mozambique, my wife and I traveled to the capital, Maputo. On the very first night, we walked out of the hotel to find a place to have a drink and not fifty yards from the entrance, a soldier with an AK-47 (or some other sort of assault rifle) shouted at us, ran across the avenue, and demanded to see our passports (in English, no less). As we naturally didn’t have them on us, we were threatened with a fine, and failing to pay that was going to result in jail. A truck with some seats bolted in the cab then pulled up, along with three to four other soldiers with AK-47s. After a few tense minutes of negotiation where he told me to get into the truck and I refused to pay or go to jail, they left. Twice in the next three days this happened again (though this time with police officers who only had pistols). I also watched other white families get harassed and pay fines.

Harassment of white Americans happens

caton

You weren’t harassed because you were white, you were extorted because you were a foreign tourist in a country that is still recovering from a pretty ruinous civil war, and your whiteness marked you out as someone who probably had a little more money than others. The fact that this happened right outside a hotel backs this premise up. This sort of thing happens even in developed countries, try going through customs in Dubai without being shaken down for a few grand.

Tyler

I actually have been to Dubai, but didn’t get shaken down. Been to lots of places, and the shakedowns only happened in India and southern Africa. But I don’t see how their civil war, which ended more than 20 years ago and they no doubt are still recovering from, excuses such behaviour.

I may not have been harassed because I was white, but I was profiled because I was white; indeed, I was accurately profiled as being a foreigner and having money to pay fines/bribes. Similar to what Mr Coates was arguing, to these officials, I was reduced to the characteristics of my race.

The wrongs are different, as you note, and do not compare to systematic profiling. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but at no point did I argue they did, either; I was responding to a previous commentator who argued that it never happens to white Americans.

exitr

But your story somewhat confirms Josh Jasper’s point. Yes, harassment of white Americans happens. But you, in fact, did not “put up with” the treatment of the Mozambican police offer – and you were able to enforce your rights in large part due to your status as an American citizen. See how that works for a black teenager stopped by a cop in the U.S.

Tyler

Ah, yes, rereading it now, I agree with you; I did stand my ground, knowing they were not very likely to do anything to me. That said, I cannot stress enough that four soldiers with AK-47s is enough to get most Americans handing over all their cash

June 26, 2013 What Science Really Says About the Soul

Posted on by Bill Blymiller

To download a pdf click here.

What Science Really Says About the Soul

by Stephen Cave

Nathalie was hemorrhaging badly. She felt weak, cold, and the pain in her abdomen was excruciating. A nurse ran out to fetch the doctor, but by the time they arrived she knew she was slipping away. The doctor was shouting instructions when quite suddenly the pain stopped. She felt free—and found herself floating above the drama, looking down at the bustle of activity around her now still body.

“We’ve lost her,” she heard the doctor say, but Nathalie was already moving on and upwards, into a tunnel of light. She first felt a pang of anxiety at leaving her husband and children, but it was soon overwhelmed by a feeling of profound peace; a feeling that it would all be okay. At the end of the tunnel, a figure of pure radiance was waiting with arms wide open.

This, or something like it, is how millions imagine what it will be like to die. In 2009, over 70 percent of Americans said they believe that they, like Nathalie, have a soul that will survive the end of their body.1 That figure may well now be higher after the phenomenal success of two recent books describing vivid near death experiences: one from an innocent—the four year old Todd Burpo—the other from the opposite: a Harvard scientist and former skeptic, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander.2 Both argue that when their brains stopped working, their souls floated off to experience a better place.

This is an attractive view and a great consolation to those who have lost loved ones or who are contemplating their own mortality. Many also believe this view to be beyond the realm of science, to concern a different dimension into which no microscope can peer. Dr. Alexander, for example, said in an interview with the New York Times, “Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body; it is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.”3

But he is wrong. The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul that can carry forward your essence once your body fails. The case runs like this: with modern brain-imaging technology, we can now see how specific, localized brain injuries damage or even destroy aspects of a person’s mental life. These are the sorts of dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks brought to the world in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.4 The man of the title story was a lucid, intelligent music teacher, who had lost the ability to recognize faces and other familiar objects due to damage to his visual cortex.

Since then, countless examples of such dysfunction have been documented—to the point that every part of the mind can now be seen to fail when some part of the brain fails. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has studied many such cases.5 He records a stroke victim, for example, who had lost any capacity for emotion; patients who lost all creativity following brain surgery; and others who lost the ability to make decisions. One man with a brain tumor lost what we might call his moral character, becoming irresponsible and disregarding of social norms. I saw something similar in my own father, who also had a brain tumor: it caused profound changes in his personality and capacities before it eventually killed him.

The crux of the challenge then is this: those who believe they have a soul that survives bodily death typically believe that this soul will enable them, like Nathalie in the story above, to see, think, feel, love, reason and do many other things fitting for a happy afterlife. But if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see, think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?

To make the argument clear, we can take the example of sight. If either your eyes or the optic nerves in your brain are sufficiently badly damaged, you will go blind. This tells us very clearly that the faculty of sight is dependent upon functioning eyes and optic nerves.

Yet curiously, when many people imagine their soul leaving their body, they imagine being able to see—like Nathalie, looking down on her own corpse surrounded by frantic doctors.6 They believe, therefore, that their soul can see. But if the soul can see when the entire brain and body have stopped working, why, in the case of people with damaged optic nerves, can’t it see when only part of the brain and body have stopped working? In other words, if blind people have a soul that can see, why are they blind?

So eminent a theologian as Saint Thomas Aquinas, writing 750 years ago, believed this question had no satisfactory answer.7 Without its body—without eyes, ears and nose—he thought the soul would be deprived of all senses, waiting blindly for the resurrection of the flesh to make it whole again. Aquinas concluded that the body-less soul would have only those powers that (in his view) were not dependent upon bodily organs: faculties such as reason and understanding.

But now we can see that these faculties are just as dependent upon a bodily organ—the brain—as sight is upon the eyes. Unlike in Aquinas’s day, we can now keep many people with brain damage alive and use neuroimaging to observe the correlations between that damage and their behavior. And what we observe is that the destruction of certain parts of the brain can destroy those cognitive faculties once thought to belong to the soul. So if he had had the evidence of neuroscience in front of him, we can only imagine that Aquinas himself would have concluded that these faculties also stop when the brain stops.

In fact, evidence now shows that everything the soul is supposed to be able to do—think, remember, love—fails when some relevant part of the brain fails. Even consciousness itself—otherwise there would be no general anesthetics. A syringe full of chemicals is sufficient to extinguish all awareness. For anyone who believes something like the Nathalie story—that consciousness can survive bodily death—this is an embarrassing fact. If the soul can sustain our consciousness after death, when the brain has shut down permanently, why can it not do so when the brain has shut down temporarily?

Some defenders of the soul have, of course, attempted to answer this question. They argue, for example, that the soul needs a functioning body in this world, but not in the next. One view is that the soul is like a broadcaster and the body like a receiver—something akin to a television station and a TV set. (Though as our body is also the source of our sensory input, we have to imagine the TV set also has a camera on top feeding images to the distant station.)

We know that if we damage our TV set, we get a distorted picture. And if we break the set, we get no picture at all. The naive observer would believe the program was therefore gone. But we know that it is really still being transmitted; that the real broadcaster is actually elsewhere. Similarly, the soul could still be sending its signal even though the body is no longer able to receive it.

This response sounds seductive, but helps little. First, it does not really address the main argument at all: Most believers expect their soul to be able to carry forward their mental life with or without the body; this is like saying that the TV signal sometimes needs a TV set to transform it into the picture, but once the set is kaput, can make the picture all by itself. But if it can make the picture all by itself, why does it sometimes act through an unreliable set?

Second, changes to our bodies impact on our minds in ways not at all analogous to how damage to a TV set changes its output, even if we take into account damage to the camera too. The TV analogy claims there is something that remains untouched by such damage, some independent broadcaster preserving the real program even if it is distorted by bad reception. But this is precisely what the evidence of neuroscience undermines. Whereas damage to the TV set or camera might make the signal distorted or fuzzy, damage to our brains much more profoundly alters our minds. As we noted above, such damage can even change our moral views, emotional attachments, and the way we reason.

Which suggests we are nothing like a television; but much more like, for example, a music box: the music is not coming from elsewhere, but from the workings within the box itself. When the box is damaged, the music is impaired; and if the box is entirely destroyed, then the music stops for good.

There is much about consciousness that we still do not understand. We are only beginning to decipher its mysteries, and may never fully succeed. But all the evidence we have suggests that the wonders of the mind—even near-death and out of body experiences—are the effect of neurons firing. Contrary to the beliefs of the vast majority of people on Earth, from Hindus to New Age spiritualists, consciousness depends upon the brain and shares its fate to the end.

References

  1. What People Do and Do Not Believe In, The Harris Poll, December 15, 2009
  2. Burpo, T and Vincent, L. 2010. Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. Thomas Nelson Publishers; Alexander, Eben. 2012. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Simon & Schuster.
  3. Kaufman, L. 2012. “Readers Join Doctor’s Journey to the Afterworld’s Gates.” The New York Times, November 25, page C1.
  4. Sacks, Oliver. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  5. Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam Publishing.
  6. Descriptions of heaven also involve being able to see, from Dante to Heaven is For Real, cited above.
  7. Aquinas’s views on the soul can be found in his Summa Theologica and elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the question of the soul’s limited faculties are Part 1, question 77, article 8 (“Whether all the powers remain in the soul when separated from the body?”) and supplement to the Third Part, question 70, article 1 (“Whether the sensitive powers remain in the separated soul?”), in which he writes: “Now it is evident that certain operations, whereof the soul’s powers are the principles, do not belong to the soul properly speaking but to the soul as united to the body, because they are not performed except through the medium of the body—such as to see, to hear, and so forth. Hence it follows that such like powers belong to the united soul and body as their subject, but to the soul as their quickening principle, just as the form is the principle of the properties of a composite being. Some operations, however, are performed by the soul without a bodily organ—for instance to understand, to consider, to will: wherefore, since these actions are proper to the soul, the powers that are the principles thereof belong to the soul not only as their principle but also as their subject. Therefore, since so long as the proper subject remains its proper passions must also remain, and when it is corrupted they also must be corrupted, it follows that these powers which use no bodily organ for their actions must needs remain in the separated body, while those which use a bodily organ must needs be corrupted when the body is corrupted: and such are all the powers belonging to the sensitive and the vegetative soul.”

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/13-03-20/

 

June 12, 2013 I Am Not “Spiritual,” but I Am Religious

Posted on by Bill Blymiller

Download a pdf version of this article.

by Sarah Oelberg

I claim to be religious — not just spiritual. Spirituality is nice – it can be comforting, awesome, beautiful and sustaining. But it is a lonely endeavor. I choose religion so that I can continue to stimulate my mind and continually ask and try to answer important life questions; so I can be a member of a religious community that gives form and structure to my belief system and enables me to work together on the problems and challenges of the times; so my family can partake of rites of passage and celebrations that fit with our beliefs and values; and so I can enjoy the support and companionship of people who share similar beliefs and values.

I’m not spiritual – at least not in the way many say they are …

Spirituality is a word and concept I have largely avoided, thinking there are better ways to describe what is important in the human condition. One reason is because it means something different to everyone, so it is not a word which gives clarity to conversation. The old chestnut is true: if you ask ten UUs what “spirituality” means to them, you will get dozens of answers. It is hard to put a finger on what this spirituality is that so many profess to seek, believe in, or to be – as in “I am not religious, but I am very spiritual.” It has come to be something of a garbage word, possibly signifying just about anything from astrology to Zen Buddhism.

Part of my (and many Humanists’) resistance to the concept of spirituality comes from some of the meanings it holds for some people – meanings which do not speak to my experience. For example, to some, spirituality is an act, such as accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. To many, it is the equivalent of theology and metaphysics. Traditional notions of spirituality deal with a nonphysical realm of the world separate from earth and its inhabitants – a realm full of gods, spirits, ghosts, and the like.

It is also used to refer to some transcendental spirit or figure which is supposedly understandable to those who believe in it, but unavailable to the rest of us who don’t buy into their particular views, or have not shared the kind of ethereal experience which has given them this belief. I tend to be suspicious, even to resent when persons or groups try to claim exclusive knowledge or ownership of something, which they say is wonderful, but which is not made accessible to others.

I have also noticed that the word spirituality is often applied to everything lumped into the category New Age: i.e, crystals, guardian angels, channeling, entities, various divinations, out-of- body experiences, ritual transformation, psychic healing, trance states, etc. As a humanist, I have difficulty with these fanciful non-material notions. I have also noted that the spirituality peddled in bookstores and at retreats and on TV talk shows tends to be kind of wispy and misty and rich in appeal to narcissism. You know – if it feels right, or is something that one instinctively knows or which makes them content, then it is spiritual and good – at least for the person experiencing the feeling.

In my experience, the “very spiritual” people who hold forth in these venues are often not the kind of folks who join with others to staff homeless shelters or carry out other works of love; they often despise organized religion, preferring personal evanescence, and many “don’t play well with others.” I know that one’s system of beliefs is supposed to be a very personal thing – didn’t Jesus say that we should pray alone – but I don’t think he meant that our beliefs should remove us from being involved in society. I think he wanted us to contemplate the state of the world, so that we can more effectively enter into it. It is not about us as individuals; it is about how we move and live and serve in the world around us. I am not convinced that much of what passes as “spirituality” does that.

In fact, I sense that, for some, “spirituality” serves as a form of escapism. It seems not to be grounded, at least not in the real world; not in what we know in our time about the nature of the world and the nature of the universe. It appears, often, to be a retreat into some pristine, past, foreign or imaginary world. And it seems to me that an authentic spirituality would require us to boldly and bravely face our world, the world of our

time, the world as we know it today – to face it and embrace it.
I also find that some use the word to express their disaffection with organized religion. They’ll say, “I’m

not religious. I don’t go to church or synagogue, but I’m very spiritual!” I think this might mean: “I have had a bad experience with organized religion, or I think it is all suspect, but I enjoy feeling a sense of awe beneath the stars by myself.”

I think everyone is religious in some way. The religious impulse is, apparently, embedded in our very being. Yes, we find different ways to express it and nurture it, but it is there. And the fact that these church- avoiders often have a need to find some other kind of group to fulfill their need for meaning and companionship – like a twelve-step group, or a Course in Miracles, or a Covenant group or study of angels class – tells me that the human need to be part of something beyond themselves is also very strong. It is quite apparent that, for many, these “alternative” groups have become the equivalent of church, and their teachings a form of religion.

But some claim spirituality in ways I could live with…

Despite problems with using the word spirituality, I find it does not have to be negative. There have been many wonderful things written in the name of spirituality. I especially like one from humanist John Dietrich, which I found long ago in one of the many of his sermons in my attic, and have used many times since: “there is an energy which springs from the heart of humanity. What it is we do not know, any more than we know what electricity is. How it works we cannot say… but that it is real, that it produces results, is as certain as that we can breathe.”1

“Spirituality” might be an acceptable word to point to an indescribable happening like the smell of a rose, walking alone in a quiet wood, being in love, being moved by a beautiful poem or piece of music, or the sense of awe when we see or experience something wonderful. It might be how astronauts have felt when they looked down upon the earth from space, and drank in the glory of what they saw.

Maybe it is how we connect with the source – whatever process made this universe and everything in it. Or perhaps spirituality is the feeling of connection we have to each other and to the all. It is the idea that we are never alone, really, that no matter how isolated and atomistic we might feel, we are part of a vast interdependent web of being; we are a small, but important, cog in the wheel of life. We are never actually separate from the very ground of existence, and what moves one part affects us all. The basis of spirituality, says Sam Harris, is that the range of possible human experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity.

Richard Erhardt suggests that spirituality is about how we live our lives. He asks questions such as: Are we focused or scattered? Are we continually challenging ourselves, our world views, our attitudes and outlooks? Or are we so afraid of being challenged that we hold on frantically against the tides of change?

The spiritual question is really, are we tossed about by every single wind that blows our way, or are we grounded firmly and calmly where we are? A person who is in touch with his own spirituality may say that there is an inner strength that keeps her centered and whole, when all around the world is trying to pull us into fragments.

So could I be spiritual?

My experience of what I might call the spiritual dimension of life comes out of my engagement with the natural world and my, albeit limited, knowledge of how that world works. It reminds me that just outside my normal range of vision there is a world of truth which I seldom seek, but which influences my life daily and wholly. The spiritual dimension helps bring together the different aspects of life, which it is all too tempting to keep separate. It reminds me that there are other ways of knowing, other ways of seeing other realities which have the possibility of changing us as we cannot deliberately change ourselves.

I would add that spirituality can provide meaning and values without a god telling us what is right and wrong. It may be a substitute for being godly – or maybe it is the same thing – being “goodly”! It

may be Kierkegaard’s “power of a person’s understanding over his or her life,” or Matthew Fox’s reminder of the tension between mysticism (awe) and the prophetic tradition, the struggle for justice. We must always balance that tension so that spirituality does not become an escape from working toward justice, or from the trials of living in the world.

And should I expect my minister to help with that?

One of the things that still bothers me about spirituality is that people expect ministers to “give” it to then. Often parishioners will say that they want “more spirituality” in services. I suspect that what they mean is that they want to feel more – feelings of connection, relief, forgiveness, belonging, contentment, joy, emotion. Sometimes it is a code word for the use of historic rituals and art forms such as prayers, litanies, special holidays, flower communion, bells, sacraments, choirs and hymns, vestments, candles – in short, everything sensual and colorful,

Farley Wheelwright, one of our oldest and most respected humanist ministers, would have nothing to do with this last idea, that disciplinary practices and liturgy have anything to do with spirituality. “It either happens to us or it does not… It is bred in the bones and defies translation or definition.”2 I agree. For me, insofar as spirituality exists, it does so when it becomes the better part of a good person’s life. I don’t believe it can be packaged in piety, or in meditation, isms, dogma or definition. Spirituality has no necessary connection to religious faiths; it has everything to do with humanity. Spirituality is that indefinable something which we all feel but cannot manufacture.

There are some expressions and definitions of spirituality in which I find some solace and meaning. I enjoy the lovely things of life as much as anyone; I experience great joy in art, music, literature, human kindness, and so on. I find a sense of peace when I connect with nature – stalking the wild asparagus or walking in the woods or prairie. I feel awe when I see a newborn child, or a cloud in a bright blue sky. These are wonderful things, and I am glad I can appreciate them. But for me, what passes for spirituality is not enough.

In all the various descriptions, definitions and explanations of spirituality, it is always very personal. It is an inner experience, which can be experienced only by an individual alone. It does not connect people, because everyone experiences things differently. It does not form community, but rather encourages separatism.

What then, do I want my minister (and church) to do, to help with?

From the clergy, from the ministries of the church, I need more than (and something different from) spirituality; I need religion. There is a reason why religion has been around virtually as long as humankind has existed; it fulfills a basic human need. From the beginning of time, people have needed a way to explain the world, to find answers to perplexing questions, to understand how the world works, where we came from, what is the nature of god and humanity, what happens when we die, how did life begin, and so on.

Many different answers have been found to these questions, depending on the times, the place, the needs of the people, etc. And so we have many, many different religions. But what they all have in common is that people derived them by trying to figure out answers to difficult questions. The Bible dictionary says that “religion may be thought of as a system of embodying the means of attaining and expressing in conduct the values deemed characteristic of the ideal life.”3

In other words, one’s religion is how one views the world and one’s place in it. It is the result of experiences, study, reason and thoughtfulness. It involves using one’s mind to come to an understanding of how to live. This is one of the major differences between religion and spirituality, but one which is very important, for we cannot live to the fullest only on instinct and good feeling. A.C. Grayling writes: “Religion offers something ‘higher,’ something overarching, something that seems to make sense of things, to organize the inchoate nature of experience and the world into a single framework of apparent meaning.”4

In the introduction to his wonderful book, Religion is Not about God, Loyal Rue writes: “If Religion is

not about God, then what on earth is it about (for heaven’s sake?) It is about manipulating our brains so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively. Religious traditions work like the bow of a violin, playing upon the strings of human nature to produce harmonious relations between individuals and their social and physical environments.”5

As Sophia Fahs said, “one’s religion is the construct (or gestalt) of all his or her smaller specific beliefs. It is the philosophy of life that gathers up into one emotional whole… all the specific beliefs one holds about many kinds of things in many areas of life.”6 As a liberal religious educator, she advocated for children being exposed to many points of view, learning about nature and science, and using reason to decide what to believe. I and my children were raised with her wonderful curriculum. I guess that is one reason why I claim to be religious – I believe what I believe because it makes sense and seems reasonable.

As with all religions, however, I find that my beliefs, although unique to me, have some correspondence with those of many others, and I have found great satisfaction in joining with those of similar beliefs. This is another aspect of religion that people over eons have found compelling. There are many good reasons to gather together; a community can provide comfort and assistance when it is needed; a group of people with similar outlook and values can bond together to accomplish much more than individuals can. It is much easier to put one’s religious values into practice when you are doing it with others – and it will probably have a much greater effect.

Charles Vail suggests in an as yet unpublished paper that religion satisfies the basic human needs of congregation, communion, creed and covenant – people coming together, sharing their thoughts and feelings, seeking and formalizing a consensus of the ideals they share in common, and pledging themselves to honor those shared ideals.7 This is why I affiliate with UU churches – they provide a place where I can find people of similar interests and values, who work for causes and issues that meet my values. It gives me a community. I often say that my religion is humanism; my community is UU.

Even though we may no longer worship the supernatural, there is still value in celebrations, in meditations, in the use of the arts to extend and deepen our feelings, our sense of significance and meaning. The person who has no need of celebrations, whether sacred or secular, natural or supernatural, is a dull person.

Religious celebration that meets our individual needs but takes place in a community, is the most composite and complete of all the arts, being the full celebration of life itself. As we create and shape our ideal ends, we should be able to project them into the friendly and demonstrative forms of poetry, song, dance, drama, prayer and ritual. This is why I go to church, for I could never experience the quality and range of the arts by myself, no matter how spiritual I feel.

Religion also offers rituals and routines for dealing with the more significant of life’s transitions, from the arrival of a child, to marriage, to death – rituals which match the values and ideals of its members. In UU churches, we provide child dedications that are not based on a notion that children are born in sin; we offer coming of age programs that help kids wrestle with the issues and problems and challenges of their lives and decide what they believe, not what someone else tells them to believe; we perform weddings tailored to the beliefs and ideals of the couple; and we have memorial services that celebrate and affirm the lives of the dead and uplift their immortality in terms of their accomplishments and presence here on earth. Sharing a somewhat common lexicon and symbology provides a means of engendering wonder, and consoling explanations to ease experiences of hardship.

All of these are reasons why I claim to be religious – not just spiritual. Spirituality is nice – it can be comforting, awesome, beautiful and sustaining. But it is a lonely endeavor. I choose religion so that I can continue to stimulate my mind and continually ask and try to answer important life questions; so I can be a member of a religious community that gives form and structure to my belief system and enables me to work together on the problems and challenges of the times; so my family can partake of rites of passage and celebrations that fit with our beliefs and values; and so I can enjoy the support and companionship of people who share similar beliefs and values. My religion is centered in myself as a human being, but it also encourages me to be part of larger community outside myself.

So, as a religious humanist, I say, “I am not very spiritual, but I am very religious.” Actually, I believe everyone is religious, if it is defined properly, and not just connected to belief in god, or accepting certain

dogma, or being the property of one church. We can be religious without god; we can be good without god. But we all need community, celebration, and answers to life’s unanswerable questions, whether we claim to be primarily spiritual, secular, or religious.

Notes

  1. John Dietrich, from an unpublished sermon manuscript. I can no longer find the exact place where Dietrich said this – but I have it written down, and have used it enough as a quotation to be fairly certain of it.
  2. Farley Wheelwright, my written lecture notes, unknown date.
  3. Madeleine S. and J. Lane Miller, Bible Dictionary, 1958, Harper Bros. New York, p. 608
  4. A.C. Grayling, from the essay “Debating Humanism,” in Humanism, Religion and Ethics, 2006, Oxford University Press, pp. 47-54
  5. Loyal Rue, Religion is Not about God, 2005, Rutgers University Press, Introduction, p.l
  6. Sophia Lyons Fahs, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development, 1952, Beacon Press
  7. Charles Vail, posted on the Humanists list (uu lists) on July 20, 2012.

Taken from:  religious humanism volume xliii number 1 fall 2012

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