religion

I’ve been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It’s less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It’s been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I’ve long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that’s a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty’s book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey’s that I’ve come to know. He’s addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it’s more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows:

• Metaphysical debates — are we really alive? what is truth? — are largely pointless. There is no conceivable end to inquiry or end to history (sorry Fukiyama), so the only thing that really matters is solving the problems before us and then the problems which emerge from those solutions, and so on.
• The concept of a Absolute Truth (or, in an older context, God), in addition to being fruitless to pursue, is often really a dodge for authoritarianism. Coincidentally, people tend to appeal to God or Absolute Truth when it supports their side in an argument.
• To the extent that we ever know Truth, we do so via a social process of consensus. Even hard science works this way (peer review), so we should embrace this concept, and resist the notion that this consensus can be created by an individual and enforced through the power of it’s own (self-referential) validity ala Monotheism or Fascism.
• Democracy is better, both in terms of individual liberty and in terms of effectiveness in producing human happiness. Per utilitarianism, maximizing human happiness is really the only outcome that makes sense to pursue.
• Likewise, the only meaningful definition of Reason is, “can you participate in the intersubjective process of communal inquiry as to how to maximize human happiness?” The idea that Reason is aligned with Absolute Truth or God is another rabbit-hole/authoritarian danger zone.
• With the demise of God (or a notion of Absolute Truth) as a provider of meaning for Human Life — what are we supposed to be/do? what does it all mean? — artifacts of culture become the new Source. The philosophers like to use poetry as the example here, but it seems very clear than any compelling work of culture high or low will work.
• In this context, a kind of friendly polytheism emerges. Should one have to choose between Emerson and Yeats? Different poets illustrate different aspects of human divinity.

Pragmatism rejects the notion of Absolute Truth as just a form of Secular Monotheism, and instead we turn to the process of communal intersubjective inquiry (Science/Democracy) and the infinite varieties of human divinity as realized through our various individual and social endeavors (Culture) as the guiding lights of our lives.

So, I don’t quite have a handle on this yet, but I feel there’s a personal connection for me here, somewhere between my hard earthly ambitions and the more ephemeral sense in which I seek to transcend my current conception of self. The idea that people, ultimately, are the source of the post-God meaning in life fitting in with the “Thou Art God” line from Stranger in a Strange Land fitting in with the experience of being so fucking on that you feel like a saint for however long it lasts.

If Thou Art God, Democracy is the path to heaven, and poets are the new prophets, what’s a boy to do? I’m not quite sure yet, but I think I like the paradigm.

I don’t want to offend anyone with this post, but I might. C’est la vie.

So, one of my newest and favorite blogging pleasures is The Brody File from the Christian Broadcasting Network (aka parent org of The 700 Club). Mr. Brody is a pretty good writer, and he’s covering politics — mostly the GOP presidential nomination process — from an angle distinctly different from my own.

I find this kind of perspective valuable. I have been generally digging on The Right’s Field, which is on a similar beat, but that’s written by people who are on my side and in some cases my friends, so it just doesn’t have the savory flavor and nuance of getting into the head of the Other.

Anyway, reading the Brody File seems like a good way to get in touch with mentalities that I don’t often encounter socially, which is worthy even (especially) when I may disagree with said mentality. Keeps things nimble and limber. I wish there were a similar blog — meaning readable and relatively non-propagandistic — that was on the “Bomb Iran” tip that most GOP candidates (save Ron Paul) seem to be rolling on. That would be tight.

Back to the point, in the first Republican debate, three of the ten candidates stated that they did not in fact believe in evolution. The rest — especially the great tan hope Mitt Romney — have been doing the politician potty-walk ever since, and Brody has been following it, for obvious reasons.

In this post he publishes some letters from readers presenting arguments for the creationist viewpoint:

First as to the literal 6 days of Creation- on day 3, God separated the land from the water. This was in preparation for when He created vegetation that same day so that plants could become rooted. On day 4 He created the sun which was essential for plant life because they require photosynthesis, provided by the sun. In addition, He created insects on day 6 to include bees which are necessary for pollination of many of the plants that are food sources. It is impossible for plants to survive without the process of photosynthesis produced by the sun. How could God create plants and create the sun millions of years later, when the sun is the vehicle by which photosynthesis is possible? The time between days had to be short since plants and the food they produce were dependent on the sun and insect pollination. Without plants, no animal life could survive. So the days of Creation had to be literal 24 hour days.

Parsing that, it sort of blows my mind that someone really thinks this way. Now, I’m sure my vague agnostic notions of physical existence, the origins of the species, and my dubious ontology of “power through belief” and “social interaction” would probably blow whoever wrote that’s mind if I tried to spell them out. People do believe in different stuff, it’s true, and we can all get along anyway. Hooray pluralism!

However, what strikes me about this (and about other arguments I’ve seen for creationism) is that there appears to be a level of complexity or scale where direct understanding fails us, and at that point Reason has a way of checking-out, or becoming disconnected from reality. I think this is probably natural. I mean, the level of complexity where it becomes difficult to impossible for a human mind to completely track what’s going on is not very high; certainly many orders of magnitude away from literal comprehension of geologic time, molecular activity, or the course of human events in a world of billions (let alone a nation of millions or even a city of thousands).

We deal in abstractions. It’s one of the things that seems genuinely special about Human Beings. Existence is unimaginably complex, and so we have shorthands and stories for all sorts of things, from Newtonian Mechanics to creation stories. There’s no way around this, though some abstractions are clearly more useful and/or externally verifiable than others.

We’re rational creatures too, another thing that’s special about us as far as we know. We like our abstractions to be true, or at least consistent and helpful in making our way through our lives. We appreciate order, and delight (at least initially) at being able to predict and control things.

We also like other people to agree with us. In this, rationality helps, as it tends to hew to the empirical ethos of the scientific method (“do you see what I see?”), but so does prejudice. All ideas are, at some level, social, meaning things get mighty sticky in the execution.

The above quote illustrates a really fascinating collision between rational and mystical abstractions. There’s a sort of agricultural shorthand, which is a little sloppy but close to what a real man or woman of the earth would tell you about what plants need to live, and there’s the deep-seeded belief in a story about how the Earth came to exist. These two are combined in a pseudo-logical argument which (QED!) “proves” that the days of the creation tale were literal 24-hour periods.

These kinds of pseudo-logical complexes are common to most mystical traditions, from Scientology and its Dianetics to the power-structure and rites of Catholicism, or the general concepts of shamanism, or psychedelia for that matter. There are things people can do, the mystic suggests, which can alter the course of events. Mystically. And there’s a code to this, maybe written in a secret book. As my man Samuel says, Witchy Shit; here’s some blood to drink.

At the same time, it doesn’t seem like there’s any real problem holding truly rational and mystical abstractions in one mind. Many great scientists (from Darwin to Einstein) were also religiously observant, even devout. On the flip, there are plenty of atheistic or non-religious people who believe all sorts of irrational things, though many of those beliefs — I’m thinking of conspiracy theories here — do approach the level of mysticism.

The problem, such as it is, seems to be that our rational and mystical threads become entangled, and when this happens beyond the margins of what we ourselves “know” or can immediately grasp — what’s within the reach of our scale-comprehension — whatever we consider common sense (which Einstein called “the compendium of all prejudices instilled by the age of seventeen”) will probably win out. There are few Christians who would deny the reality of Nuclear Power, but the follow-on conclusions reached through the same scientific principles, e.g. radiological dating, are unacceptable. Because the linkage between the real/graspable thing (electricity!) and the implied conclusion (the Earth is billions of years old) is beyond the understanding of most people, it’s just the word of some guy called “a scientist” vs. common sense.

What I’m interested in is how the stack of abstractions that we use to make sense of reality gets built, how it functions, and how some abstractions seem to have the effect of extending the scale of our comprehension, while others do not. It seems to me that there’s a way of evaluating the worth — or perhaps the persuasiveness — of an idea in there somewhere, and that it might be a good one.

Also, how is it that some people seem to be able to scale their understanding further than others? Is this learned, and if so how?

Anyway, lots of food for thought.