Lessons from Antaeus

One more quick post. If you are interested in my argument about metaphorical thinking and agree that we are endangering ourselves by trusting too much in the abstract and losing contact with the natural, the physical—please read Simon Critchley's recent piece in The Stone series of the New York Times, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auschwitz”:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/?emc=eta1
And, as Critchley requests, please watch the whole video that is embedded in the essay (not long).

Tyranny of the Abstract

Just a quick note while I'm working on the post about the ocean and the unconscious mind. A judge has ordered the hospital in Texas to take the body of Marlise Munoz (the brain-dead pregnant woman) off “life support” but has also given the hospital until 5pm Monday to comply with or contest the decision. The hospital is considering an appeal. 
 
What struck me most in the New York Times article about this situation¹ is this information, which to my knowledge had not been previously released:
“Lawyers for Ms. Muñoz’s husband, Erick Muñoz, said they were provided with medical records that showed the fetus was 'distinctly abnormal' and suffered from hydrocephalus — an accumulation of fluid in the cavities of the brain — as well as a possible heart problem.
The hospital acknowledged in court documents that the fetus was not viable.”

So, the mother is brain-dead, the fetus is severely disabled and “not viable” (not able to live outside its mother's womb) and yet the hospital persists in totally ignoring the actual situations of these two people and also the ongoing sufferings of the families of the two. Surely an abstract law should be held as more important than the physical and emotional well-being of all these people, right?

If this isn't the failure of metaphorical thinking in spades, I don't know what is—allowing an abstract concept to override compassion, concern for real living beings. How is this different from what we normally think of as evil?

PS--I'm a bit nervous about using the term "evil" and want to clarify what I mean.  I do not believe in "cosmic evil," but in how merriam-webster.com defines the term, using such descriptions as "causing harm . . . sorrow, distress, . . . suffering . . . discomfort or repulsion . . . morally reprehensible."  The families of Marlise Munoz have certainly been caused harm, including sorrow, distress, suffering--a lot more than discomfort.  I and other onlookers have certainly felt repulsion.  The actions of the hospital are "morally reprehensible" in that way.
I wish that we as a society could see that certain decisions can add up to wrong action, without the individual decisions being able to foresee those wrong actions.  But metaphorical thinking--giving equal weight or hopefully even precedence to the real over the abstract--should help us to see this when it occurs.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/us/judge-orders-hospital-to-remove-life-support-from-pregnant-woman.html?emc=eta1

Just a Metaphor

How often do you hear the phrase, “but that's only a metaphor”? Because I particularly notice such denigrations of my favorite subject, I can tell you that it (or a variation on it) occurs quite frequently, in speech and in print. The phrase seems to suggest that metaphors are not fact but fiction, and thus we must remind ourselves to get back to reality after using a decorative metaphor. I totally disagree.

This idea was expressed in a very round-about way in an article by Timothy Egan, “Words for the Dumpster,” about words and phrases that have become useless for various reasons.¹ Here's the part that caught my eye: “. . . I renew an earlier objection to 'literally.' It’s become the most overused of phony emphasis words, as in 'I went to the store, and they were out of kumquats — I mean, they were literally out of kumquats!'” True, the emphatic use of the word “literally” should not be necessary in ordinary speech—saying there were no kumquats in the store should be enough. But I think people are using “literally” more often lately because so much speech today is so inflated and abstract that we feel we have to add the tag “literally” to make sure the listener knows we are speaking fact and not exaggerating this time. (I'm as guilty of this kind of exaggeration as anyone else in my personal life.)

OK—Let's get back into what metaphor is. A metaphor pairs up an abstract idea with a concrete image that can represent it in the real world, as in the depths of the ocean representing the unconscious mind (see next post). To use the concept “just a metaphor” is usually to favor the concept (unconscious mind) over the real thing (ocean). And yet, what do we really know about the abstract idea without reference to the concrete image? It's so much easier to fudge clarity and responsibility when you are speaking only in abstract terms! No one has any grounds on which to pin you down—metaphorically, of course.

Let me get some help from the modern poet Wallace Stevens in explaining this. Here's what he has to say about poetry (and by his extension reality) in his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”: “The subject-matter of poetry is not that 'collection of solid, static objects extended in space' but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it.” Perhaps even a materialist could concede that it is basically impossible for us to look at objects in the outside world without reference to our history with them. Looking at an oak tree, for example, I might have (probably unconscious but still influential) associations with what Joseph Conrad said about the English oak as a literary symbol, with the fact that I spent the latter part of my childhood in a house on a street called Oak Lane, with the memory that we kids sometimes had nasty snowball fights in which acorns were embedded in the snowballs, with the fact that even in my present property after I have mowed or raked up the leaves from all the other trees some stubborn oak leaves still cling to their twigs, with the fact that oak wood has a deep grain that I really like so much of my furniture is oak, etc., etc. On the contrary, when I look at poison ivy, I have an entirely different set of associations. It doesn't matter too much if these associations are unconscious because everything we look at is tinged with some emotion created by the accumulation of our associations with that object.² 

We really cannot perceive something in the outside world without at least a tinge of emotion; even if we behold something we've never seen before, the brain pulls up associations with similar things or perhaps generates fear of the unknown. Even quantum physics (to the extent I understand anything about it) seems to concede that even under scientific controls, what we look at is affected by our observation. The truth is, our sense of reality is really a relationship between ourselves and the so-called objective world.

In another essay, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens uses a metaphor to explain his sense of reality as a relationship between outside and inside worlds: 
 
“A poem is a particular of life thought of for so long that one's thought has become an inseparable part of it or a particular of life so intensely felt that the feeling has entered into it. When, therefore, we say that the world is a compact of real things so like the unreal things of the imagination that they are indistinguishable from one another, and when, by way of illustration, we cite, say, the blue sky, we can be sure that the thing cited is always something that, whether by thinking or feeling, has become a part of our vital experience of life, even though we are not aware of it. It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there—few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.”³
 
To put it rather reductively, when I was growing up in a Western Christian culture, I heard all sorts of explanations about the sky: heaven is up there (and thus also dead relatives), when there is thunder God is bowling, it is blue because it reflects the oceans (or was that vice versa?), you can see familiar objects in the clouds, there is a “man” in the moon, etc. We naturally project ourselves onto things in the outside world; we tend to humanize them and thus make them less threatening. And all this before I began to study science. One thing science tells us is that beyond our hospitable atmosphere is a vacuum, where nothing can live. Another thing science tells us is that it is possible that one day we may lose our atmosphere and the earth will become as barren as Mars, which once had an atmosphere but lost it.

I assume that many people embrace religion because its stories give us more hopeful and thus more comfortable associations with the world. It really would be just too scary to walk around all the time thinking about how everything around us (and all life) might be lost someday. (And isn't that partly why so many people deny global warming?) But we really don't even need religion to console us about the meaning of our life. Just in the process of living in this world, we accumulate experiences that emotionally color the things in the world. For me, for instance, the snow on the ground outside today is beautiful—not because I know that it is made of frozen particles of water, but because I have many happy associations with snow (and a few negative associations that do not outweigh the happy ones). And because we are all human and share basically the same neural and hormonal systems, many humans have similar reactions to many things in the outside world, even though our individual experiences vary somewhat. This is the basis of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. 
 
Reality is a relationship that we nurture as we move through our lives. Reality is metaphorical; it combines outside things and internal thoughts and feelings. It's worth repeating Stevens here: “We live in the center of a physical poetry. . . . [we] are looking at the world of [our] own thoughts and the world of [our] own feelings.” What a self-affirming, beautiful way to understand life!

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/opinion/egan-words-for-the-dumpster.html?emc=eta1

2Neurologist Antonio Damasio presents a wonderful picture of how the brain may give rise to consciousness by its “mapping” of things in the outside world, which includes the value of that thing for us and thus its emotional tone. See especially chapter 3 in Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2000).

3Both essays appear in The Necessary Angel (Vintage, 1951). The two quotes are from pages 25 and 65-66 respectively. The book is also available online, e.g.: https://archive.org/details/WallaceStevensTheNecessaryAngelEssaysOnRealityAndTheImagination

Time Travel

Because I am fully retired now and no longer have to deal with the craziness of December when teaching college courses, I have had time to reread over the past several weeks two fantasy novels that take place in the holiday season and really resonate for me. I have finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L'Engle, which takes place over the Thanksgiving holiday and presents a variation on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I am now halfway through The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper, which runs from just before the winter solstice and through the twelve days of Christmas. Both books are written for young readers, but as with any good fantasy, they offer much to older readers as well. Cooper's book holds up better to multiple readings, but only because the actual writing is better; the plots of both books are fascinating. These books have led me to believe in a kind of time travel by way of ritual.

L'Engle's novel presents the effects of a world-ending threat by a (fictional) South American dictator, as experienced by a family gathered for the Thanksgiving holiday. (The real Cuban Missile Crisis took place in October, but Thanksgiving is close enough—the closest family holiday, and I think part of L'Engle's point is that evil is more possibly overcome during a time of rituals.) As the family waits out the twenty-four hour period in which the world might end because of a nuclear holocaust, certain rituals sustain them: the fire in the hearth and the candles on the table, the same Thanksgiving dessert as every year, the same foods in general, the same table cloth; one the mother-in-law recites a rune (or poem) from her personal and cultural past, the twins set the table as they have always done, a young woman's relationship with a new dog reenacts memories of a relationship with a former dog, and so on. Note that it is tangible things that help these humans to deal with the abstract dread of annihilation. 

One character, the youngest child Charles Wallace, actually does time travel on a magical unicorn to make the one change in past events that will result in a different person being born than the threatening South American dictator, and so averts disaster. But what is most fascinating is the many people in the past Charles Wallace visits and how their names and habits and skills and talents often move through the generations. In this book, we see not only traditions remaining stable through time but to some extent also types of people and the choices people confront recurring. The danger of a nuclear holocaust hangs heavy on the “swiftly tilting planet” (which is of course literally happening any November), but the consistencies that the people of this family find in their traditions and in the ancestors of one of them over time stabilize the world. One might say that our repeating relations with real things and real people are what stabilize us in the face of abstract threats.

In The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper ties the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year for us northerners, to the rise of evil, but Christmas traditions again stabilize the people in this book, and even more strengthen them—literally empowering them when the traditions are understood. Again, the youngest son of a large family sets out on a quest. (His birthday is the midwinter solstice; he's the seventh son of a seventh son; he turns eleven and discovers he is the last of the magical Old Ones.) The main requirement of his quest (and thus his effort to turn back evil) is to collect six “signs,” each one in the form of a quartered circle (a circle enclosing a cross), but each one of a different material: iron, bronze, wood, stone, fire, water—collected in that order.¹ In part, Cooper is reviewing the evolution of humans with these forms and reminding us of how in so many myths and legends natural forms such as these have mystical properties and powers. Again, it is the tangible that can fight the abstraction of evil. 
 
But, even more, Cooper in using the quartered circle draws on many mystical and spiritual associations. Most immediately, perhaps, the quartered circle is the astrological sign for Earth, and all the elements that make up the six signs come from the earth. More particularly, if I might draw from Wikipedia, the astrological sign of a circle denotes spirit, while the astrological sign of the cross denotes “practical / physical matter.”² So, the quartered circle is also a symbol of metaphor—the joining of the physical and the abstract. The circle, of course, is also a symbol of wholeness, and the cross, as an intersection of lines on two opposite planes, is a symbol of conjunction. It is wholly appropriate that Jesus Christ, that symbolic being who is both god and man, hangs at the intersection of cross-pieces on the crucifix. And at least one theological interpretation of the Roman Christian cross is the descent of the timeless divine (vertical piece) into human experience (horizontal piece, or chronological timeline). The quartered circle is also the central component of the Celtic cross, and Cooper intertwines many northern European myths and legends into this story. 
 

When the six circled crosses are joined together into one larger circle, the Dark can be defeated, at least for the time being, just as the northern hemisphere of the earth tilting back toward the sun after the winter solstice increases light in our world, at least for a while. In a symbolic way, Will Stanton is gathering together these signs made from natural elements that have been important to people throughout human history to make a symbol of the wholeness of our experience as humans over time. But the actual process is physical, using physical symbols; it is a kind of ritual, paralleling the rituals of the Christmas season, and thus overcoming the limitations of any one point in time.

I once taught these books in a course on fantasy literature, and I have read them many times. I hope now to make rereading them one of my rituals over the holiday season each year. What matters is the re-connecting to something tangible that has had value to me in the past and thus brings back memories. Wordsworth called this “emotion recollected in tranquility.”³ It is well known that tangible things that stimulate our senses, whether in reality or in imagination, evoke emotions when they evoke memories. (Think Proust.) Likewise, though I am not now a practicing Christian, I grew up as an Episcopalian, and I love hearing the old Episcopal service (Rite I). This year I found a local performance of the Anglican Ceremony of Lessons and Carols, so I look forward to attending that each year during the holidays. 
 
But what really sends me off on my own personal experience of time travel is putting up a Christmas tree. Now that my kids are grown, I put up a small table tree and decorate it with some ornaments that I have winnowed from the great number that used to decorate our large Christmas trees in past years. Each ornament I have saved has a history and thus a memory and an emotion for me: the first ornaments my husband and I bought (cheap, at Sears) for our first Christmas tree, the felt birds that were favors at a Christmas party given by some clients when my husband and a friend were setting up a new business, the ornament I bought at the university I taught at for nearly thirty years, the tiny china bells an aunt gave me, ornaments made for me or my family by friends and family, a flat shiny angel with my name on it that my mother bought for our Christmas tree when I was a child, something similar for my two sons, the two small carved wooden ornaments that I bought for my first Christmas tree as a single person, the ornaments that memorialize our two dogs, and on and on. Looking at this tree each year makes me feel happy and whole, because it is the gathering place of so many memories and emotions. I was joking with one of my sons this morning that perhaps we should call it the Time Travel Tree, rather than the Christmas tree.

It is very dark and dreary today, and like everyone else I am a year older, but the physical things we use as parts of our rituals, in church or in secular celebrations, ease us along by reminding us that time does not just move in one direction, toward an end. We can with our memories and imaginations re-experience and enjoy the past and anticipate the future and thus even temporarily defeat chronological time. That's what rituals are for.

Here's to a wonderful New Year!

1Some critics argue that this order represents a backward, anti-chronological portrait of human evolution and thus is a kind of time travel in its own right: we all began in water; early on we tamed fire; then we learned to work with stone and wood, and later make tools in bronze and then iron.

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_symbols

3In his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads.

Hammock & Canopy

I had an interesting reflective experience recently. One of my sons took me to an Art Garfunkel event at a nearby library. Garfunkel is making appearances in small locations (like this library's theater) while recovering from a loss of voice in his upper range. He sang some great old songs and read some poems of his own and then answered some questions. It was a wonderful, soothing trip into the past. At several points Garfunkel spoke of his current wife, once using one name and once using a different name that might have been her nickname but was not obviously so. It was a slightly confusing moment—wait, you just said her name was X, and now you are calling her Y! I registered the discrepancy, thought about it for a bit, then let it go. But I also noticed that several of the women sitting in the row in front of me looked at each other, eyebrows raised in query. These women had been talking steadily among themselves before the show started and continued their interrelations during the show with looks, smiles, etc.--ongoing social contact. On the other hand, my son and I rarely spoke during the performance, processing all the events internally and separately—at least until we got home and talked it all over.

The looks and smiles the women exchanged with each other during the performance stuck with me as an image of something that I mostly don't participate in. I'm an introvert and need a lot of time to myself to think in order to function well psychologically, but most other people seem to be extraverts who need ongoing social interaction to maintain themselves. In the week following the performance I began to remember an image from a fantasy series that my son introduced me to maybe ten years ago. The image is a forest canopy, and it appears in the book Elven Star, which is volume two in the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (1990). In this cycle, there are four worlds, one based on each of the four elements of “sky, fire, stone, and water.” The world in Elven Star is Pryan, the world constructed around fire—the sun is at the center of this world, literally. Here's part of the synopsis of the book: “On steamy Pryan, Realm of Fire, never-ending sunlight and plentiful rain have created a jungle so vast that humans and elves dwell high in the trees and only dwarves live anywhere near the ground.”¹ In other words, the more sophisticated beings in this world live in a canopy of leaves and moss, and many of them don't even know they are not on solid ground.

I began to see the ongoing web of social interactions that the women in front of me at the concert were weaving as similar to the canopy world of Pryan. This is a good metaphor, I think, for the social world of culture all humans inhabit—it is woven of human creations and human interactions, and many people accept it as the real world, whereas it is really hovering over the original, more obdurate world of nature. And it's only during and after a significant natural disaster, like Sandy last year here on the East Coast, that some humans are forced to admit that their everyday lives do not play out on solid ground, even while they insist that the social canopy be rebuilt immediately.

Of course, we all want the safety and comfort that social institutions usually provide us—we all want to rebuild schools and hospitals and homes, though we might begin to question rebuilding homes on barrier islands. But many people insist that even the trivial parts of the social canopy are reality. There's a game going on among some truant youths in Brooklyn these days that they apparently call “the knock-out game.” The goal is for one of them to knock out another person with one punch. Unfortunately (and not saying much for their machismo), these youths have been mostly choosing unsuspecting women walking on the street to knock out. When I heard of the most recent female victim on the radio, the announcer mentioned twice that she had just come out of a nail salon when she was punched out. I wasn't sure what to make of this detail. Was I supposed to worry that her expensive nail job might have been ruined when she hit the sidewalk? Or was I supposed to lament the fact that we live in a world where a woman's nail job can't always be safe? Wasn't this just a bit beside the point? But then the announcer played a tape of another woman in the neighborhood shouting that everyone had the right to go to a nail salon and that they wouldn't be stopped from doing so by these thugs. That's living in a tissue-thin canopy, if you ask me.

The social world of culture that is constructed by human interactions is quite impressive on the whole. But I often find myself very uncomfortable with more local manifestations of it. I know that I'm different from most people in this, and I'd like to get a little personal here for a moment to conjecture why. I grew up in a family atmosphere of emotional instability. My parents were fighting an ongoing psychological battle with each other and were themselves, each one, very emotionally needy in different ways. We kids had to support or tolerate our parents in their neediness, though we very often did not get the emotional support that we needed from them. The most important thing we could do for our parents, especially our mother, was to be the perfect family in the eyes of outsiders. There was a very strict division between what went on inside and how we presented ourselves outside. I always felt the social canopy was false, in other words—made up of appearances rather than reality.

And nature was always the closest I came to security and consolation. The world of nature is just what it is; it doesn't ever intend you any harm, though it may occasionally do you harm. The animals and plants are just trying to survive with the simple means they have to do so. They will mostly leave you alone unless you threaten them; they do not make unreasonable psychological demands upon you. I found I could rely on nature much more than I could rely on people. There was a small woods behind our house (before it was all chopped down by people in order to make more houses for more people), and I used to walk in the woods a lot and commune with myself and nature and achieve some small amount of serenity out there. I truly cannot understand how other people can trust people more than nature, or how they can see getting their nails done as a right, as an important event in their lives.

Many aspects of the social world scare me, because they seem very fragile and unrealistic to me. I am very aware of how high off the ground they are, so to speak—how far removed from natural reality. What I did growing up was to create a psychological hammock for myself, if you like. It's like a social canopy, in that it is woven from human interactions, but it is woven from my own thoughts and relations with myself and just a few other trusted intimates and it is very close to the ground (the reality of nature), so that if I fall out I believe I can get back in again, even if I get hurt. I am constantly in my head weaving together past and future and present into a whole structure that I can exist within, much as extraverts do with their social contacts. This worked very well for me for several years; my “real” world inside gave me the stability that the dangerous social canopy outside did not give me. I kept the two carefully separate, even though I participated in both. But it seems to me that more and more social media are threatening the hammock and insisting that everyone live together in the canopy. Even more, the social media seem to demand disruption rather than continuation in thought and emotional relations—it's a Twitter world, not an epic or lyric world. I feel less and less comfortable in this world as the days go by. 

Perhaps I am just a member of a vanishing species that cannot adapt. I could actually accept that, as an individual, but I also keep having fears that the social canopy is in a way becoming a threat to all or most humans and other living things, not just to me. There was a very scary essay in the Stone series in the New York Times a few weeks ago that renewed my fears: “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” by Roy Scranton.² Scranton believes that we have “passed the point of no return” in the process of global warming and that we must accept that the world of relative abundance many of us have lived in over the past few centuries in the West is in effect “already dead”--the nail salons may still be open for business, but not for much longer. In the future, we will be scrambling for food and water, not worrying about the appearance of our nails. Scranton concludes, “The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves [as we are now], the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”

The problem is, as T.S. Eliot memorably put it, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”³ Many people, who cannot entertain the possibility that nail salons are not a right or even a permanent part of human culture, choose denial over the acceptance that Scranton advocates. They don't even really choose denial; the unconscious mind simply doesn't allow the threatening reality to filter into consciousness. This is a big problem, which is in part responsible for the environmental mess we are in now and probably will be in part responsible for the demise of the natural world that we have evolved to live in so successfully. The social canopy may well bring about the demise of the earth that supports it. Scranton describes this fearful situation:
“The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”

This is why I keep writing about the process of metaphorical thinking. Of course, we should enjoy the parts of culture that help us, but it seems to me that we should also work very hard to remember that culture is not all there is of reality—in fact, that culture is the less durable part of reality. If we think of culture as an abstract phenomenon and nature as a concrete phenomenon, then it would be metaphorical thinking to keep the natural reality in mind as we move through our lives primarily in the cultural realm. The “knock-out game” is really a good metaphor for this way of thinking. We might like to believe that we live in a world where getting our nails done is an important event, but every once in a while something more basic punches us in the face and knocks us down. Jonathan Swift also provides a helpful metaphor in his great satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels. In part III, “A Voyage to Laputa...” (and other places), Swift satirizes intellectuals who are not in touch with reality. The Laputians are so wrapped up in intellectual speculations that they need to hire servants called “flappers” to tap them on the eyes or ears or other sense organs if they are in danger from the outer world they are so oblivious to and need to perceive that world, if only momentarily. It seems to me that we humans (as a whole) are so proud of our abstract speculations and so oblivious to the possible negative consequences of becoming so removed from the natural reality that we also need flappers! 

One more metaphor to conclude this post, this time from Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, scene ii, Claudius uses a series of paradoxes to describe the emotional conflict inherent in his marriage to Hamlet's mother so soon after the death of Hamlet's father: “. . . with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole . . . .” I would think that Shakespeare has Claudius speak this way at least in part to indicate that Claudius is not a man who respects natural boundaries. But that very awkward and even comic image of one eye looking up while the other looks down sticks with me as a telling image.  Isn't that what we should be doing these days, metaphorically? It's fine to cast one eye forward into a future world of abstract relations via the social media, or to keep one eye focussed on the artificial worlds of culture, but it also behooves us to keep one eye trained on the real world, the world of nature, the world we have evolved from and into which we fit. If Rome is burning, we should do more than just watch TV.

1Both quotes are from the back cover of the Bantam 1991 paper edition.

2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/?emc=eta1

3From “Burnt Norton” I, in Four Quartets.

Empathy Is Everything

It was good to see another article by Robert Wright in The Atlantic online recently. The essay, “Why Can't We All Just Get Along?,” is an extended review of two books: Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes and Paul Bloom's Just Babies, both exploring a biological basis for morality.¹ Wright discusses Greene's famous thought experiment, often referred to as the “trolley problem”:

An out-of-control trolley is headed for five people who will surely die unless you pull a lever

that diverts it onto a track where it will instead kill one person. Would you—should you—pull

the lever?

Now rewind the tape and suppose that you could avert the five deaths not by pulling a lever, but by pushing a very large man off a footbridge and onto the track, where his body would slow the train to a halt just in time to save everyone—except, of course, him. Would you do that? And, if you say yes the first time and no the second (as many people do), what’s your rationale? Isn’t it a one-for-five swap either way?

As Wright reveals, brain scans of people considering this problem have indicated that “people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” Logical thought is abstract thought (thinking in categories), while emotional thinking is tied to the physical body, which feels emotions physically, concretely. (Research has shown that people reading a novel and identifying empathetically with a character have the same parts of their brains light up on brain scans as when they are actually experiencing the same perceptions or emotions themselves.²)

When Wright asks, “what's your rationale? Isn't it a one-for-five swap either way?” he is thinking entirely abstractly, in categories and numbers. Further along in his essay, Wright concludes, “In a sense, then, people who obey their moral intuitions and refrain from pushing the man to his death are just choosing to cause five deaths they won’t be blamed for rather than one death they would be blamed for. Not a profile in moral courage!” I wonder about this judgment, as logical as it sounds. I think the choice (whether to allow five people to die remotely or to push one “very large man” to his death), along with the fact that most of us seem to be unwilling to do the latter even to prevent the former, brings into focus the reluctance of many of us to think only abstractly about moral questions. And I think that reluctance is not an evolutionary throwback but a neglected strength we need to nurture in order to survive our current head-long surrender into the abstractions of technology. Maybe we have to remember that there is an emotional logic as well as a rational logic—a logic that functions from empathy and not just from reason.

The reason for moral resistance against pushing a man off a bridge to his death in order to save five other people, at least for me, is two-fold. First, the man is “very large” and thus has a lot of blood and guts in him; there is a natural and understandable aversion in many people to slaughter a human body and see the results—because of our natural empathy. (I don't mean here that we empathize with the individual but that we empathize with the fragility and messiness of the human body. In that way we are no different from him, and we don't like to be reminded of that.) Also, this “very large man” is by definition larger than the great majority of people who might try to throw him off a bridge. What if he throws me off instead—would I make a large enough splat to at least slow down the trolley car? For that matter, what right do I have to murder this man rather than just throw myself off the bridge; wouldn't that be a more moral response to the situation? I feel I have the right to dispose of my own life but not the right to dispose of the life of an innocent man. (Maybe I'm carrying all this unwanted fat for a reason!) But it is the immediacy of blood and gore that deters most of us from killing anyone we dislike; it's much easier to kill people by flicking a switch, without having to deal with the mess. (Even the Nazis preferred to cram their victims into a shower room and poison them, a bloodless form of murder.) That makes mess a good thing, though most of us will go to great lengths to avoid it. Many of us no longer witness the messiness of birth and death or even sometimes of cruel disease—we usually leave those things to the institutions created to handle them. Thus we distance ourselves from the messiness; it becomes an abstraction; it doesn't disgust us or move us to empathy.

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses a book by Martha Nussbaum titled Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice.³ In her book Nussbaum argues, “If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions … these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of ‘our’ life in which these people … matter as parts of our ‘us’.” Here Nussbaum clarifies the antithesis between abstract thought and emotional relations and argues that emotions are definitely a part of the quest for justice and harmony among people. Fish sees that “political emotions, then, are the emotions evoked and provoked by the state’s effort to educate its citizens into a culture of enhanced empathy.” Emotional connection is necessary to the harmonious relations of peoples in a state. We have great problems with this in the United States right now, where many citizens are of very different cultural backgrounds, but the wealthy and the conservative often attend private schools or are home-schooled, thus not often having the opportunity to meet people different from themselves and come to know at a gut level that we really are all alike at a gut level—and beyond. As Daniel Goleman has put it, “The more powerful were [in studies] less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful. . . . Freud called this 'the narcissism of minor differences.'”⁴ Goleman also reveals that the less powerful are more compassionate toward others because they have to relate to many other different kinds of people in their everyday lives. Affluent and powerful people, however, can and often do create social and economic cocoons for themselves, within which they do not meet people significantly different from themselves with any regularity. Thus, compassion for others different from themselves often does not develop.

Did you see that photo of Pope Francis touching and kissing the disfigured head of the man afflicted with neurofibromatosis in St. Peter's Square?⁵ That's empathy; it's an acceptance that this man is not different from the rest of us, but very much like us and afflicted nonetheless. It occurs to me that churches might address the increasing loss of empathy in our world not just by preaching about abstract ideas like love and harmony, but by providing weekly opportunities to do something like Pope Francis did with that afflicted pilgrim. One of the rituals at Easter time is that the priest washes the feet of some of his parishioners. This makes a good symbol, but how much more valuable would the act be if it were performed by regular people—on the homeless, perhaps? What if church could become a place where those of us who rarely confront the physical fragility of our human lives anymore are actually encouraged not only to deal directly with that fragility in others but also to realize that this is potentially what we are also? How not to empathize then?—much harder, anyway. I know that churches bury their members and baptize their newborns and visit the sick and gather food for the hungry and money for the poor. These are all good efforts. But what if a church service consisted in part in people laying hands on some of their diseased and disfigured fellows (who were willing to participate in such a service)? What if the service took place not in a beautiful church but in the homes of some of the poorer people in the community or in the homes of families with very ill or disabled members living at home—or in the institutions where these people are often sent? What if the ill could be bathed and dressed, a dinner prepared for the poor in their own home, a dead body washed and laid out, as used to be done at home? What if physical acts of empathy like this were the essence of church-going, rather than listening to sermons on abstract ideas and handing over money so that others might take care of the the messy parts of life?

If you think of the human race as vulnerable as a whole to certain physical and mental weaknesses, then to feel empathy for those individuals who become the ones to bear these inherent human weaknesses is to embrace humanity for what it truly is. Using money or power to distance yourself from such weaknesses, while all too human a reaction, is to not accept one's own humanity, one's own part in the human experience; it is to seek to escape the human experience. Might religion someday work towards restoring us to our humanity by physically bringing together on a regular basis the fortunate and the unfortunate? Right now most people meet people very much like themselves in church. Might churches find a way to strengthen our empathy by moving us towards acknowledgment of the mess of human life, rather than away from it? That would be much more the church functioning as a “field hospital,” as Pope Francis has described it.⁶

1http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/

2See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all among many other articles.

3http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/fish-love-and-politics.html

4The article is titled “Rich People Just Care Less”:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/rich-people-just-care-less/

5http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/11/how-strong-is-pope-francis.html

6This post was written before another review of books on the trolley problem appeared: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/books/review/would-you-kill-the-fat-man-and-the-trolley-problem.html?emc=eta1

This review in the New York Times Book Review by Sarah Bakewell discusses David Edmonds' Would You Kill the Fat Man? and Thomas Cathcart's The Trolley Problem. The essay is largely uninformative and unreflective, though it is interesting that Bakewell cites two female philosophers as being the originators of versions of the trolley problem—Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, unlike Wright's identification of Joshua Greene.

Science & Symbol

In the New York Times' really interesting Stone series on philosophy, Gary Gutting recently responded to Steven Pinker's lament that humanists don't pay enough attention to science.¹ Gutting claims, on the contrary, that “There is good reason . . . to think that the greater problem is scientists' failure to attend to what's going on in the humanities.” Gutting reveals that many philosophers and historians of the scientific disciplines actually have advanced degrees in the science of their study, whereas it's pretty unusual for a scientist to have done significant work in the history or philosophy of her discipline. As Gutting clarifies, “The problem of disciplinary narrowness became critical only with the advent of 'scientists'--a term invented on the 19^th century—whose work became so technical that it was hard to avoid the perils of overspecialization.”

Gutting quotes Pinker on one error that some humanists make that particularly bothers him: “Pinker also claims that science has shown that all traditional religious accounts of 'the origins of life, humans, and societies — are factually mistaken,' since 'we know. . . that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history.'” Gutting, of course, points out that humanists in general, including very many religious people, accept the theory of evolution. But I think that's not the most dangerous mistake Pinker is making here.  Science can be dangerous and certainly arrogant when it accepts without thought that “facts” tell us everything we need to know. What about symbols? What about story? Are they truly irrelevant? It seems to me that while science has been very helpful to the human body, symbol and story are much more nurturing to the human mind. “Facts” alone are not enough for human well being.

Pinker's certainty in rejecting religious stories and subordinating the humanities to the sciences reminds me of an episode in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion², which I have thought to be deeply revealing about the limitations of science ever since I read it years ago. This is the episode of the “Devil Bird”:

One of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate contemporaries, who was deeply

religious, went camping in the Scottish isles. In the middle of the night he and his girlfriend

were woken in their tent by the voice of the devil—Satan himself; there could be no possible

doubt: the voice was in every sense diabolical. My friend would never forget this horrifying

experience, and it was one of the factors that later drove him to be ordained. [Dawkins later

hears from some zoologists] . . . “Manx Shearwater!” they shouted in delighted chorus. One of

them added that the diabolical shrieks and cackles of this species have earned it . . . the local

nickname “Devil Bird.”

This passage amazes me. First of all, with friends like Dawkins, . . . right? But of much greater concern is why Dawkins implicitly and explicitly demeans a person he otherwise calls clever, mature, and a friend. A more imaginative, compassionate, and psychologically sophisticated person than Dawkins might very well have paused to consider why a clever, mature friend should have become a priest in part because he heard a scary noise outside in the dark. If Dawkins had any imaginative sympathy and any ability to question his own absolute beliefs, he might have learned more about what it is and can be to be human—in a positive, not a ridiculous sense, as Dawkins presents it here.

But in order to laugh (sneer?) at this “friend,” Dawkins proceeds from an absolutely unquestioning acceptance of the philosophy of materialism—that all that exists is physical matter. Does the man really have no internal world at all? Does he really reject that there can be any psychological or spiritual experiences that cannot be understood and dissected by science? I do not know Dawkin's friend and have not heard his side of this story, but if I were camping in the country in the dark and heard a diabolical voice, I might have been seriously freaked out also, though I certainly don't believe in any external devil.

I would think that most educated people by now understand the devil to be internal--that there is evil, and that it comes from the minds of human beings.³ So, if I heard “diabolical shrieks and cackles” in the dark, I'm pretty sure the sound would become for me an outer placeholder for the experience of potential evil inside, the potential for evil all of us humans carry inside of us. If I were Dawkin's friend I might well have had to confront during that night the awareness of evil inside myself and inside us all. Sounds are very closely associated with emotion, which is why music is a universal language. Just as in Bible stories (most of which are fully allegorical) where an external devil tempts Job or Jesus, we face internal temptations towards evil at times during our lives. To have an external image (visual or aural) to help us to remember and deal with those internal temptations is what literature gives us, what analyzing our dreams can give us, what good teaching of the humanities can give us, what religion has given us in the past.

Dawkins' assumption that there are no psychological or spiritual powers of any value outside the functioning of the physical brain, that all is material and thus literal, is dangerously naïve and demeaning. Metaphorical thought, in which we anchor psychological / spiritual understandings in physical images, gives us a much more sophisticated and honest and holistic view of the world than science alone ever can.

1http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/sciences-humanities-gap/?emc=eta1

2NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, pg 112.

3Tsvetan Todorov has suggested that fantasy has to some extent been undercut by psychology, since psychology has shown that the devil is internal, not stalking us in the external world. See The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).