Body & Soul

There is much that I admire in the encyclical on the environment by Pope Francis, “Laudato Si'”¹, and I will be writing at least one more post on it. But today I want to address a central issue in the encyclical that I think Pope Francis rightly raises but also remains somewhat blind to in his own Church.

A major theme running throughout “Laudato Si'” is the relationship between things physical and things spiritual. Francis argues that because of a developing spiritual malaise among the peoples of the world, we are enabling the degradation of the environment. In turn, the degradation of the environment hinders our spiritual growth and understanding. This process Francis calls “the spiral of self-destruction which currently engulfs us” (P 163). Also, on a larger level:

“Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” (P 139)

Moreover, the Pope warns us on many occasions about the dangers of abstract thought, which he curiously connects with science. Taking a phrase from a former publication of his own, he emphasizes one idea twice: “realities are more important than ideas” (P110) and “realities are greater than ideas” (P 201).² I find it curious that Francis connects abstract ideas with science, which is surely the most empirical of all our human disciplines (theoretical physics aside), and concrete realities with religion, which is surely one of the most abstract of all human disciplines because it is based upon empirically unprovable doctrine. I will take this curiosity up in my next post, but for now I want to call the Pope out on a smaller but related issue connected to metaphor.

In trying to show that religion respects realities more than science does, Francis discusses the relationship between the human body and spirituality. He does admit that “. . . Christians have not always appropriated and developed the spiritual treasures bestowed by God upon the Church, where the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly realities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us” (P 216). Certainly many of the early Christians were very ascetic. St. Paul, after all, advised them:
“If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry—it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Corinthians 7:36-38, RSV).
The idea here is that a human being can be better oriented toward the spiritual in life if celibate, if not indulging in the pleasures of the body. And it is clear that a more spiritual, less physical life is the “better” choice according to Christianity to this day. This is partly why, presumably, Christian priests (of the Roman Catholic persuasion, anyway) take vows of celibacy.

Francis stresses, however, that Christianity's respect for the physical world is obvious in the sacraments, which use natural objects (water, oil, wine) “to become a means of mediating supernatural life” (P 235)--and even more so in the “fact” that the Son of God took on physical human form. Thus, Francis concludes, “Christianity does not reject matter. Rather, bodiliness is considered in all its value in the liturgical act, whereby the human body is disclosed in its inner nature as a temple of the Holy Spirit and is united with the Lord Jesus, who himself took a body for the world’s salvation” (P 235).³
OK, this is where I'd like to challenge the Pope to apply his thoughts to his own Church. If the Church respects matter—and human physicality in particular, why has human sexuality been so anathema through church history to church leaders? Consider the early experience of St. Bernard of Clairvaux:
“An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives.⁴

So much for respecting the body God gave him, much less the bodies of others! This is just one very old example, but, as Naomi Klein has recently written, it is not so long since Catholics prayed after communion during Advent, “Teach us to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven.”⁵

 

Not only do priests have to be celibate, but there is also a long history of the projection of sin and sexuality onto women in the Roman Catholic Church, as indeed can be seen in the quote above. We all know the story of Eve. Mary had to be a virgin—that is, sexually innocent, in order to be the mother of Jesus. And then Mary had to be the result of an immaculate conception so that she was not the result of human sexuality herself. We might remember more recently the fourteen-year-old Brazilian girl who had a legal abortion because she was pregnant with twins by her stepfather and the doctors said she would not survive the pregnancy.⁶ The local Roman Catholic archbishop excommunicated the girl's mother and doctors, saying: "They took the life of an innocent. Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored” --as if that fourteen-year-old girl were a whore! There is no evidence that the man who raped his stepdaughter was excommunicated, and wasn't he certainly less innocent than the girl or her mother or her doctors? One might argue that this is an extreme case, but the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, has “gently criticized the encyclical for failing to adequately emphasize the role of women and girls in human development.”⁷
 

All of this strongly contradicts what Francis says in his encyclical about the virtues of the physical world, for instance:

“The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.” (P 155)

If, as Pope Francis states above, the acceptance of our bodies as God's gift is essential to “any genuine human ecology” and thus also to care of our natural environment, why are those in the Church most trusted with the teaching of the people, i.e., the priests, so determinedly distanced from anything other than an abstract, impersonal understanding of human sexuality (in theory)? Shouldn't the Pope's concern for the interrelations of human body and natural environment demand that priests have a full physical experience of their human bodies?

Moreover, I wish Francis would consider the extreme damage that one abstract idea, celibacy, has done to many real human bodies. Certainly the great majority of human beings cannot (and do not want to) successfully deny their sexual instincts, including priests who have taken vows of celibacy. And when natural sexual desires are prohibited, they very often become more twisted than they would be in a freer sexual atmosphere. There is much talk of a “gay lobby” at the Vatican; even the Pope has mentioned it.⁸ I do not consider homosexuality to be a sexual perversion at all, but the Church does. So, how many young Catholic males, afraid that their church and their society would condemn their budding homosexuality, turned to the Church for help and a compensatory status, by becoming priests and taking the vow of celibacy? And how many of those men have not been able to remain celibate but, unwilling to give up their lives in the Church, have expressed their sexual desires secretly, in unapproved ways, often with children, who can be bullied into not telling? Or how many young Catholic males have embraced the celibate priesthood as a way of protecting themselves from the female “whores” around them? Not all, of course, but certainly more than a few! The Church's conception of human sexuality is extremely twisted, and it has led to some really horrible outcomes, both in the lives of the priests who cannot remain celibate or cannot accept female sexuality and in the lives of their victims.

I greatly admire Francis both as a man attuned to the modern world and as a thinker. But he is just as blinkered about the nature of women as anyone else in the Vatican, at least in part because he has presumably never known a woman intimately. He has talked about women having a role in the Church, just not any role that might challenge the roles of the males in the Church. Again, he chooses abstract rules about the role of women in the Church over the reality of what real women might achieve. And this when opening up the priesthood to married men and women (married or not) would open up the church to the realities of the physical world that Francis so wants us to attend to—and rescue the Roman Catholic priesthood from its falling numbers at the same time!

So, I have to conclude that as much as I agree with the Pope's argument on the environment, and specifically with his insistence that “realities are more important than ideas” (stressing the image over the idea in metaphor), I cannot see that the Pope's or the Church's actions live up to his words. I accept the Pope's call to live a simpler life more friendly to the environment. But I also call on the Pope to make the changes necessary in his Church (particularly dealing with human sexuality) that are necessary to enable the relationship he wants people to have with their environment.

One other point. Like so many others, Pope Francis fears that the unconscious mind leads us to behave selfishly: “Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence” (P 105). I disagree greatly with this characterization of the unconscious mind, but I will just ask the Pope to consider that conscious abstract ideas also decidedly lead to selfishness and violence. Racism is one such. Misogyny is another. Celibacy has become one also. The Roman Catholic Church is largely not racist, but it is still heavily misogynistic in many of its teachings and blind about the dangers of required celibacy. I ask the Pope to consider his own words in the context of his Church: “realities are more important than ideas.”

1http://www.news.va/en/news/laudato-si-the-integral-text-of-pope-francis-encyc

Each quote from this document will be followed by the paragraph number of its location in the document.

2Both quotes have the same footnote reference, so I don't know if the two quotes appear together in the work referred to or if Francis is quoting loosely, and thus not accurately at least one of these times.

Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 231: AAS 105 (2013), 1123.

3Here Francis is quoting his predecessor Pope John Paul II.

Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen (2 May 1995), 11: AAS 87 (1995), 757. 

4Quoted from Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (NY: Ballantine, 1999), 44. This information seems to be taken from Galfredas Claras Vallensis, Vita Tertia: Fragments of a Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Latinae (Paris, 1844-1864).

5Quoted in Naomi Klein, “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker online, 10 July 2015.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-visit-to-the-vatican

6http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1883598,00.html

7Quoted in Naomi Klein, “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker online, 10 July 2015.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-visit-to-the-vatican

8See, for instance: 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/pope-is-quoted-as-acknowledging-a-vatican-gay-lobby.html

Story vs. History

I am about a third of the way through Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment; it's a very long document! (Here's a link to the English version on the Vatican website, if you want to read it.¹)

I find I agree with some of what the Pope is saying, but what really jumped out at me was a comment he makes on the value of story. He's discussing the biblical stories of Cain and Abel and of Noah when he says:

“These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.”

Please note that Francis openly calls these episodes in the Bible “stories,” not histories. And Francis emphasizes the importance of the symbolism in these stories. These episodes are stories because they contain symbolism, a literary motif, whereas histories largely do not—they just report the facts. Also, because of the symbolism in these “ancient stories,” we can share in the meaning of the stories, even though they were first told so many years ago. Symbolism tends toward universal understanding, whereas fact is often specifically local. A person of any faith or of none could understand the symbolism of these stories.

Symbols are images with many associated meanings and values; in that sense they are akin to metaphors, though metaphors have a more restricted relationship between image and meaning. Think of the American flag, which is a concrete image—in our imaginations we can see it, touch it, hear it flapping in the wind. To a patriot, this image is a symbol because it conveys thoughts and feelings of patriotism and respect, of the history of this country, of bloody sacrifice for freedom, and more—all abstract ideas that find an expression in the image of the flag. But our America flag is also a symbol to radical Muslims, though in a very different way. Some of them think of imperialism, violence, aggression, and even the devil when they look at the American flag. So, our flag is a symbol with multiple meanings, depending on who is looking at it but also even within one person looking at it.

For biblical literalists, the story of Noah can be nothing but fact; it is history, not fiction. Despite the fact that many religions and cultures over the course of human history have generated flood stories, some people have looked and are still searching for Noah's ark—the remains of an actual wooden vessel. For these people, this historical event happened once and allows us a limited set of interpretations. But if we see the ark as a symbol, then we have many more possible interpretations that are available to us now and in the future. An ark is a vessel that floats on water; in this story it floats on water that God sent to destroy almost all life on the earth. So, an ark enables its passengers to survive death and destruction of a great magnitude. Sometimes a person (of any time and any culture) will experience radically threatening events in her life or even just in her mind. The story of Noah, if we know it, can help her to find an ark of another sort to get through the chaos and desolation. The ark and the water are images that, when held in the mind and pondered, allow us to conceive of surviving catastrophe. That's one universal symbolic reading, and I haven't even discussed the animals!

When conceivably the most powerful religious leader on the planet speaks of biblical events as stories containing symbolism, rather than literal histories, we should listen. If we don't start thinking symbolically, metaphorically about the world we live in, if we continue to ignore the suffering we inflict upon other living beings in our world because we are so caught up in abstract ideas of profit and superiority, we might just not survive the flood of negative environmental events to come.

1“Encyclical Letter 'Laudato Si' of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home,” news.va, 18 June 2015:

http://www.news.va/en/news/laudato-si-the-integral-text-of-pope-francis-encyc

Nosy "Neighbors"

The title of my blog (“Metaphorical Times”) has a double meaning for me. I mean to comment on how important metaphorical thinking might be in these times of run-away abstract thought. But I also draw on publications, like the several newspapers named the Times, for insight on what is happening in our world and what might be done about it, metaphorically. This morning I had a happy experience of serendipity in my readings: two articles that deal with nosiness in different ways.

I was reading an older article about Walt Whitman in the New York Review of Books, and this statement by J.M. Coetzee caught my eye:

“There is a certain sophistication, governed by unspoken social consensus, whose nature lies in taking things simply for what they seem to be. It is this sort of social wisdom, whose other name might be tact, that we are in danger of denying to our Victorian forebears.”¹

Coetzee says this while discussing the general unawareness by early readers to apparent allusions to homosexuality in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The passage grabbed me, however, because it seems to me to be such an appropriate comment on our increasingly social-media-ized world. In fact, I would say we are not only in danger of denying this generous tact to ourselves, we have largely lost the ability to appreciate it. We seem to think it old-fashioned and not relevant anymore.

We obsess about trannies and who comes out as gay, as well as who might be having licit or illicit sex with whom. High school kids with relatively little sexual experience feel compelled to declare their sexual orientation in the social media. Sexual activity has left the realm of the private and entered the realm of the public. Thus, Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner is hailed for his “courage” as he underwent his sexual transition by the popular New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof: “Bruce Jenner is now a gold medalist again.”² Why has sexuality become so important a focus in our social lives? I guess we see ourselves as more open-minded about sexual matters than previous generations, but I think it's also possible that we are just more nosy because it has become not only acceptable but even laudable to be nosy. Nosiness is often euphemized as sharing, which begs the question of whether the recipient of nosiness is ok with sharing.

Coetzee considers that Freud's warnings about the bad effects of sexual repression have brought about this situation, but he also notes:

“Pace Freud, it is perfectly possible to refrain from having fantasies about the private lives of other people, even of our parents, without having to repress those fantasies and to bear the consequences of repression—the notorious return of the repressed –in our own psychic life. We pay no psychic price when, for example, we refrain from ruminating on “the intimate details,” “the actual facts,” of what other people do when they visit the bathroom.”³

The problem with our choosing to concern ourselves with the “private lives of other people,” of course, is that while we think we are being open and accepting, any social act of witnessing what should be personal becomes, effectively, a comment on the personal thought or act. It is, inevitably, a kind of social pressure, and it virtually abolishes subjectivity. I keep thinking of the early anthropologists who thought they were observing the natural behavior of certain peoples, when in fact their presence—even if relatively unobtrusive—changed the nature of the experience for those peoples. This is now known as the “observer effect.” A person cannot freely experience her own individuality if her most private thoughts and actions are being observed. One becomes an object, rather than a subject, inevitably. (See my previous post, “Subject or Object?” 14 December 2014.)

After I read Coetzee's essay on Whitman, I happened to read this in the excellent Stone series on philosophy in the New York Times:

“Minding one's own business isn't easy. Most people prefer to live among like-minded others, and most are interested in limiting how different their neighbors are. But life in a free and open society requires living on publicly equal terms with strangers one may well loathe. . . . a free society cannot tolerate those who would disregard the liberty of others to live as they see fit. One cannot harm others in pursuit of one's own ideals, or because one feels deeply insulted by their lives and opinions. The critical question is not whether I judge a person to be radically misguided, or judge her way of life to be morally repugnant, but whether she is a danger to the life and liberty of others.”⁴

“Minding one's own business isn't easy,” but the social media make not doing so a lot easier. Anyone who uses a computer to get online knows that much of her personal life is being monitored and used by social media and marketers. Tyler Clemente found out that a computer could also monitor his sexual activities in his own dorm room, unknown to him, and broadcast those activities to an audience. Was Tyler consoled that the audience would not judge his sexual activities? Apparently not, since he committed suicide shortly thereafter.⁵ The violation of an individual's private life is a serious issue. Celebrities like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner expect and want such scrutiny, usually. But when any one person's thoughts and actions become acceptably open to the scrutiny of others, then that person has been harmed. And I would go further, to say that the society that would allow and encourage such nosy activities is also harming itself--especially if the individual has asked that such intrusions stop, and those intrusions do not stop. As a very basic minimum, I should be able to control who has access to my bedroom and my activities there. Tyler Clemente did not, and others will not either.

Is society substituting the joys of voyeurism for the pleasures of privacy because we really do not have any choice, in the long run? Do we want the approval and security of the group more than we respect the right of the individual to privacy? Or is it possible that we might someday prefer the hard work of minding our own business, relating to others with tact, and respecting their privacy and individuality? I will continue to hope for the latter.

1J.M. Coetzee, “Love and Walt Whitman,” New York Review of Books online, 22 September 2005:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/sep/22/love-and-walt-whitman/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Gaza+Bellow+Roman+glass&utm_content=NYR+Gaza+Bellow+Roman+glass+CID_e02dc102f506ef99351cfb298e787b25&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Love%20and%20Walt%20Whitman

2Nicholas Kristof, “Bruce Jenner's Courage,” NY Times online, 5 February 2015:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/opinion/nicholas-kristof-bruce-jenners-courage.html

3Of course, some people do obsess about this; Freud would say they are stuck in the anal stage of development.

4This passage is spoken by Jerry Gaus, professor of philosophy at University of Arizona, and recorded in “The Virtues of Political Disagreement,” an interview by Gary Gutting with Jerry Gaus, NY Times online, 11 June 2015:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/the-virtues-of-political-disagreement/?emc=eta1&_r=0

5See Ian Parker, “The Story of a Suicide,” The New Yorker online, 6 February 2012:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/06/the-story-of-a-suicide

Damned Lies & Religion

“Democrats today convey only minimal awareness of what they are up against: an adversary that views politics as a struggle to the death. The Republican Party has demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice principle, including its historical commitments to civil rights and conservation; to bend campaign finance law to the breaking point; to abandon the interests of workers on the factory floor; and to undermine progressive tax policy – in a scorched-earth strategy to postpone the day of demographic reckoning.” --Thomas B. Edsall¹
 

“People are more likely to break social norms if they see other people violating norms, even if there is no direct connection. . . . there is now overwhelming experimental evidence for that theory. So it's not crazy to think that CEOs might start violating pay norms because they see quarterbacks getting big checks.” --Paul Krugman²

“Set the bar low enough and all blame is deflected, all shame expunged. Choose the right points of reference and behold the alchemy: naughty deeds into humdrum conformity. Excess into restraint. Sinners into saints. . . . There's always someone higher on the ladder and getting a whole lot more, always someone who establishes a definition of greed that you fall flatteringly short of. One titan's bonanza becomes the next titan's yardstick, and the pay of the nation's top executives spirals even further out of control.” --Frank Bruni³

These three comments are presented in chronological order of publication; they are all opinion pieces from the NY Times by relatively liberal writers. Edsall in the first quote points out the willingness of Republicans to break almost any ethical standard in order to preserve their own power in the face of changing voter demographics that do not favor their policies in the future. Krugman is speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek in his piece, but I take what he says seriously. And I think that Bruni points out how the growing conservative commitment to breaking social norms justifies itself, along with Krugman's observation.

I'd like to add one further observation to this series of concerns by liberals. It doesn't have to be well-paid athletes that businessmen use as questionable role models, but people generally more respected: priests, ministers. And it doesn't have to be only money that conservative businessmen bend ethics to achieve; it can also be power to assert the “truth.”

Republicans lie more than Democrats; there are many studies that confirm this fact available on the internet, but here's one.⁴ Republicans also vocally uphold religious values more than do Democrats, particularly those of Christianity. Again, there are many studies available on the internet to show this; here's one.⁵ One might think that being a good Christian would preclude much lying, but I think there's a clear connection between adhering to a religion and lying.

Religions are based on stories. Stories are fictional. I would argue that fiction tells more of the truth than fact does very often, especially psychological truths. I have no problem at all with stories, even religious stories. Many of the latter are quite beautiful and life-affirming. The problem I have with religious stories is simply that religious people very often accept and promote them as fact. Thus, Jesus literally came back to earth after death, in body; Jesus even told the apostle Thomas to stick a finger into one of his crucifixion wounds. For this reason, among others, the Catholic church tells us that the elements of the sacrament of communion, bread and wine, literally and factually become Christ's blood and flesh in our mouths. 
 
The problem is, none of this can be proved as fact; in fact, it is faith in story. Again, I have no problem with faith in story—the way we choose to tell our own life stories can keep us sane or not. Stories are very important. But stories lose their whole value if they are seen as fact, not fiction. Fact can teach us only limited aspects of reality; fiction can teach us a more transcendent reality, both physical and spiritual—metaphorical. Transubstantiation of the eucharist is a beautiful metaphor of spiritual union, which becomes potentially disgusting when taken as fact. 
 
It seems to me that many conservative Republicans who are pragmatic businessmen or powerful leaders in different fields see in people's responses to Christian stories how to have it both ways. And it certainly doesn't have to be an issue of conscious forethought; unconscious understandings will work quite well. If we pronounce that fiction is really fact, then there is no natural, shared foundation for truth and the people who say fiction is fact become the only foundation for truth. Priests and ministers have played this role for many centuries. If they say something is true, then some people will believe it is true, maybe wholly because it is asserted as an absolute—and absolutes are a lot more comfortable to deal with than the ambiguities of real life. 
 
So, if a Republican declares that Obamacare is ruining the economy, some people will believe it. If a Republican declares that Obama wants to kill off old folks or take everyone's guns away, some people will believe it—if only because it has been asserted in an oracular manner, and it's easier to believe an assertion than to research the truth.

Thus, by promoting fiction as fact, religion loses its value as beautiful, consoling, inspiring story and becomes a cynical manipulation of truth and power. And this is what the conservatives promoting their own versions of “truth” are doing as well.

1Thomas B. Edsall, “The State-by-State Revival of the Right”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/opinion/the-state-by-state-revival-of-the-right.html?emc=eta1

2Paul Krugman, “Broken Windows and American Oligarchy”:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/broken-windows-and-american-oligarchy/

3Frank Bruni, “Weary of Relativity”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-weary-of-relativity.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Ffrank-bruni&contentCollection=opinion&action=click&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article

4http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-lie-more-than-democrats-study-finds/

5http://www.gallup.com/poll/27889/Abiding-Relationship-Republicans-Religion.aspx

Psychelics and Metaphor

I recently read a very annoying article on why life is absurd.¹ Why did I find it annoying? Because it mostly ignores our biological imperative to reproduce and assesses life only on our culturally inherited aspirations.² In other words, it deals with the abstract at the expense of the concrete. Rivka Weinberg, a philosopher, characterizes the normal human life span as “fleeting, ludicrous, minute,” not far from Thomas Hobbes's “nasty, brutish, and short”³ Hobbes, however, describes the physical life of man for the most part in this phrase, while Weinberg uses terms that portray our psychological response to the shortness of human life, for the most part. And there's the rub.

Defining absurdity as “when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purposes or situation as to be ridiculous,” Weinberg concludes that, yes, human life is absurd: “By the time we have an inkling about what sort of work we might enjoy and do well, most of us have little time to do it. By the time we figure anything out, we are already losing our minds.” Bleak, huh? But to Weinberg absurdity seems inevitable, because our average lifespan is not long enough to allow us to find fulfillment or achieve mastery in any of our pursuits: “. . . if we cannot remove the obstacle of absurdity then it will be hard to conclude that life has meaning or determine what that meaning might be.”

Well, to me, Weinberg's essay is absurd because, though she does mention being a mother herself, she assesses the value of human life in totally cultural, not biological terms. Metaphorical thinking, this is not. Obviously, most of us have plenty of time to meet our biological imperative: to reproduce ourselves and help others to do so as well. Weinberg's essay ignores the great majority of people in this world who choose (or have the choice thrust upon them) to value their lives based on their families. Not only that, but her reasoning is a classic example of assuming that life is now almost entirely cultural—that we have to a great extent vanquished the demands of biology.

As much as we as a species do seem to be moving in that direction, as individuals we do still get born, grow, get sick, give birth, and die as biological beings. It seems to me that anything beyond fulfilling our biological imperative is gravy—a matter of choice, not a necessity. If we reject any value in the biological realities of our lives, then, yes, life can become a matter of existential angst. But if we respect and even celebrate the biological realities of our lives, then everything else we choose to do is just further reason to celebrate. You can't have the depth of a metaphor without the anchor of a concrete image. You can't have the depth in a life without (I believe) the anchor of our biological realities. It's not just a question of limits increasing appreciation of life, but also of the unconscious wisdom that is tied more to our bodies than to our conscious minds.

In another recent and fascinating essay on the therapeutic powers of psychedelic drugs,⁴ Michael Pollan speculates that psychedelic drugs (administered in controlled conditions) help ease existential anxiety because they suspend the tyranny of the ego. He refers to the experience of Aldous Huxley:

“In 'The Doors of Perception,' Aldous Huxley concluded from his psychedelic experience that the conscious mind is less a window on reality than a furious editor of it. The mind is a 'reducing valve,' he wrote, eliminating far more reality that it admits to our conscious awareness, lest we be overwhelmed. . . . Psychedelics open the valve wide, removing the filter that hides much of reality, as well as dimensions of our own minds, from ordinary consciousness.”

What many people experience under the influence of psychedelics is spiritual wonder and an acceptance of the limited role of the individual within this extraordinary (unreduced) realm of existence. The ego afterwards is grateful not to have to carry responsibility for the meaning of life and relaxes enough to know that it resides within larger meanings without any effort beyond being able to see beyond itself—so unlike Weinberg's inability to escape the conclusion that life is absurd, despite much intellectual effort.

Pollan also quotes Robin Carhart-Harris, post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacolgy, on what we lose as our egos mature and consolidate in adulthood: “We give up our emotional lability, . . . our ability to be open to surprises, our ability to think flexibly, and our ability to value nature.” Pollan concludes: “The sovereign ego can become a despot. This is perhaps most evident in depression, when the self turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality.”

Philosophy is necessarily rooted in abstract ideas, but literature can be redeeming if it survives the onslaught of “theory” and returns to individual thought about metaphor, imagery in particular. I came to maturity in the Sixties, but I never took any hard drugs, hardly any soft drugs, either. Literature is a way free to all to explore the big abstract ideas about our existence while also being rooted in the very important reality of the natural world, thanks to the workings of metaphor—and without the potential dangers of drugs.

1Rivka Weinberg, “Why Life Is Absurd,” NY Times online, 1/11/15.

2Weinberg does mention having children, but she believes that we do not have enough time to rear children well. Thus, she is focussing on the cultural rather than biological aspect of reproducing.

3Hobbes famously characterizes the life of man in his Leviathan as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

4Michael Pollan, “The Trip Treatment,” The New Yorker online, 2/9/15.

Subject or Object?

The philosopher Michael Lynch has published two essays on privacy in the New York Times philosophy forum, The Stone. They are simply stated but startling in their implications. I think it's time we thought much more deeply about the relationship between privacy and personhood.

In his first essay, “Privacy and the Threat to the Self,”¹ Lunch argues that without privacy, we cannot cannot be fully subjective human beings: “. . . what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. . . .  A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.” Why? Because if you don't have “privileged access to . . . your hopes and dreams, beliefs and fears,” then someone else can define them for you and use them to manipulate you. We become the object of other people's thoughts rather than the subject of our own. Lynch then presents this chilling thought experiment:

“ . . . imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings—I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself—and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don't, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.”

Of course, all of us who use the media are subject to a version of this thought theft everyday, via advertising and marketing. It is a fact of life that there are people who use my computer's link to the internet to monitor what I read, what I consider buying, and even to a realistic degree what I think in the privacy of my bedroom (where I keep my computer) in order to guide me toward actions and decisions that will enrich or empower them. Or what if you are in a relationship (unknowingly) with a sociopath who apparently empathizes with you but also uses his growing knowledge of your psyche to use you and betray you? Or what if someone wearing Google glass records a private conversation you are having with a friend in a public place and then uses that knowledge of your personal life to blackmail you? Or what if now or someday very soon, people will be able to read other people's thoughts, via computer chip or not, and use that information to manipulate you? We are obviously approaching something close to total lack of privacy very quickly. We have to understand the consequences.

Let's take the example of the person speaking privately to a friend in a restaurant. That person has chosen to reveal a problem to this particular friend, presumably because she feels pretty sure that this friend will understand to some extent what troubles her and why and will thus handle the information carefully and respectfully. The speaker's subjectivity will remain intact. But if the person wearing the Google glass is able to record some of this information and interpret it in the context not of the speaker's psyche but of his own agenda, then the speaker has lost control of defining her problem and her self and has essentially become an object for manipulation to the other person. If we are to remain subjective individuals on any level, we have to have control at the very least of who has what information about us. As Lynch puts it, “As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.”

What, exactly, does the government know about you? What, exactly, does Google or your cell phone provider know about you? In all truth, we do not and mostly cannot know. We really can't know how others are using information about our private thoughts and feelings in order to manipulate us into buying things or betraying ourselves or other people we know. Big Brother is very deeply entrenched. Or maybe we should rename him Big Father, because people are using our private information to judge us and thus affect our future options: your Facebook account, your medical records, any interaction you've had with law enforcement, what you've written online. 

In his second article on privacy, “Privacy and the Pool of Information,”² Lynch has this to say about the government surveillance program: “When we systematically collect private data about someone, we implicitly adopt . . . [an] 'objective' or detached, attitude toward her. We see her as something to be manipulated or controlled. . . . [A government that collects private data on its citizens] has begun to see them not as persons, but as something to be understood and controlled. That is an attitude that is inconsistent with the demands of democracy itself.” 

What does all this have to do with metaphor? People will always lean toward pleasing authority and cleaving to a group for protection. As long as we can objectify others by removing their own subjective right to control their own private information, people will abuse others in order to enhance themselves—because they see those people as objects, not subjects like themselves. In the Milgram experiments, in which people were willing to torture other people at the command of an authority figure, one of the few changes to the experiment that allowed for some compassion toward the victim and disobedience of authority was when the torturer was near or in physical contact with the victim.³ Then the torturer could see the victim as subjectively suffering, as she indeed would herself in the same situation. This is where metaphor comes in. The authority's command is essentially abstract—Do this, whatever you might think about it. But when the apparently real suffering of a real, physical individual became part of the experiment, many fewer people were willing to obey the authority figure and inflict suffering on a fellow human being. In other words, we always need to pair a real, physical image or experience with an abstract idea in order to test our own morality and to avoid our dangerous tendency towards subservience to authority.

But if an individual is ostracized from a community, the people in that community really have no real physical individual against which to test their abstract ideas, and prejudice can become pervasive. Oh, he's black, he's lazy. Oh, she's a woman, she likes to suffer, she brings it on herself. Oh, he's Polish, he's stupid. Oh, he's Jewish, he's deceptive and tight-fisted. And when there is no platform in that community for an individual to correct assumptions, then prejudice will become fact for the people of that community; the individual will be objectivized by them; and the community will feel quite free to punish the individual in order to maintain its own ideas of superiority. And if an authority figure, like Hitler, who feeds on people prejudices and fears, comes into power, the life of ostracized individuals can become very miserable indeed—and quite possibly beyond their power to correct. 

As our lives become more and more abstract, as we telecommute and get groceries delivered and communicate with friends online rather than in person, we greatly increase our risks both of becoming hardened by living by abstract ideas without the correction of real, physical individuals and of harming those individuals with our ignorance and lack of compassion. Personal privacy is the corrective in our increasingly abstract lives. If we give up our privacy willingly or allow others to take it essentially by force and without protest, God only knows what we will become. 

1New York Times online, 22 June 13.

2New York Times online, 27 July 14.

3“In the variation where the learner's physical immediacy was closest, where participants had to hold the learner's arm physically onto a shock plate, compliance decreased. Under that condition, thirty percent of participants completed the experiment” (as opposed to 65% who completed the experiment when the victim was in another room and could be heard but not seen). Completing the experiment meant giving increasingly painful shocks to the victim at the command of an authority figure, up to 450 volts. (Victims were not actually shocked, but they did cry in pain, and the people administering the shocks did not know there were actually no shocks.)

A Note on Anselm

In my last post I quoted part of St. Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God, his definition of God as “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.”¹ I think this is a great definition of God, in part because it provides us with an ideal goal and in part because it seems to imply that God is a concept. It's quite clear that the human concept of God has evolved over generations,² even just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. The vengeful Yahweh of parts of the Old Testament is certainly not the loving and forgiving Father of most of the New Testament. Culturally, we have become more refined, and as we have so our God also has become more refined. It was once the greatest we could conceive that we should use violence to spread Christianity; it is now for many of us the greatest that we can conceive that we use generosity and compassion towards each other, Christian or not, based on Christ's teachings. In this sense, God and the church have provided ideal guidance for us via the latest conception of God. It seems right that God should evolve as we do. Do we still want an authority figure telling us to kill our children when they curse at us? Thus, God is a concept—our concept of what is best under current circumstances.

But Anselm doesn't leave it there. He is writing an ontological proof for the existence of God, not just a definition of God. Here's how he continues in his “Proslogion”:

“And certainly that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist only in the understanding. For if it exists only in the understanding, it is possible to think of it existing also in reality, and that is greater. If that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the understanding alone, then this thing than which nothing greater can be thought is something than which a greater can be thought. And this is clearly impossible. Therefore there can be no doubt at all that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the understanding and in reality.” (245)

OK! I am not a theologian, by a long shot, but I know enough of the logical arguments of philosophy that I can question this reasoning. Let me just focus in on the word “reality.” Anselm leaves it undefined, and I find little reference to it in the rest of this work, other than the acknowledgment of this fallen world we inhabit. But Anselm wrote the “Proslogion” in Latin. In English, our word “real” comes from the Latin “res,” meaning “thing” or “fact” (among other definitions). So, when Anselm refers to reality, presumably he is referring to the objective world of things we know through our senses—and to Anselm, this world was a fallen world, a world of sin. In Christian teaching, we struggle through this fallen world as best we can in order that we can someday exist in heaven, that ideal realm. In this struggle it is helpful to have a concept of “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” But does Anselm really mean to imply that God exists (has being) in our fallen, real world?

The other thing that confuses me in Anselm's argument is that he is presenting God as metaphorical—as existing both as idea and thing. But surely this is Christ's role in Christianity! Jesus Christ, as his name shows us, is undoubtedly metaphorical—part spirit, part body; part divine, part human. The whole point about Christ, it seems to me, is that he is God made manifest, God incarnated, God in a body. If God was already such a metaphorical being, why would we need Christ? If we had access to God as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, to walk with and to speak to, why would we need Jesus? 

Apparently Anselm means to argue that God exists in some abstract way, not in the reality of this world. I guess to Anselm he exists in heaven. But we cannot know God or heaven directly, since we are creatures of this fallen world. We need(ed) Christ or Mary or some other quasi-human, quasi-divine being as teacher and intermediary. (Thus was Mary granted an immaculate conception herself.)

To me, Anselm's attempted ontological proof of God's existence is simply a paradox. If God is “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived,” then he cannot exist in this fallen reality. In Anselm's definition, God makes more sense as one of Plato's ideals than as a being that can exist in reality. If God could exist in our reality, then he (as I'm sure Anselm conceived of him) would be just one more entity in our fallen world, nothing particularly special. To me, the greatest I can conceive is definitely NOT real in any common sense of that term. I absolutely look outside this world for my ideals (to literature, philosophy, etc.) because I know I cannot find them in this world. That makes a thought greatest—the fact that it is an aspiration and an ideal, separate from this fallen world.

There's still a metaphorical relationship here—between us humans and the ideals we aspire toward (i.e., God). Many of us admire and emulate Jesus: WWJD? We can, in a sense, lift ourselves up by our moral bootstraps that way, aspiring towards God. But this only works if we accept that God is our conception of the best and greatest, the most ideal--not that he is a Father that in any way exists in this world and can save us from it. Then we are responsible for our own ideals and our attempts to live up to them, and then God can continue to evolve, leading and inspiring us along the way. Anselm says later in “Proslogion”:

“Lord, you are then not only that than which nothing greater can be thought; you are something greater than it is possible to think about. For since it is possible to think that this could exist, if you are not that thing, then a greater than you can be thought; and that will not do.” (257)

If God exists in reality, then he must have some stable form, which limits him. But if God is the greatest we can conceive, then he can evolve infinitely—and mentally so can we. “What is now proved was once only imagined.” “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”³

1This is the most common translation of Anselm's words and the one I prefer. However, following quotes from Anselm's “Proslogion” (from which his definition is taken) are from the translation by Sister Benedicta Ward, SLG, in The Prayers and Meditiations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion (Penguin Books, 1973). The wording of Anselm's definition of God in this translation is: “We believe that you are that thing than which nothing greater can be thought” (pg 244). To me, the connotations of the word “conceive” are more fitting to Anselm's definition than the connotations of the word “thought.” But this is the book I have, so this is the book I'll work from.

2See Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (2009).

3William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”