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).

Pastoral Paradigm

Frank Bruni of the New York Times has shouted “Hallelujah”!¹ I can only add “Beautiful, Wonderful!” A very prominent person has, essentially, endorsed the process of metaphorical thought—and a person in an organization that has, until very recently, functioned to buttress absolute ideals at the expense of concrete realities. I'm talking about Pope Francis, of course, and the ideas he expressed in an interview published recently in several Jesuit magazines.²

I'm not saying that the Pope has entirely abandoned boiler-plate Vatican pronouncements. His interview comments on women in the church were highly abstract and, I felt, evasive. And a couple of days after the interview was released, Pope Francis made some very standard comments about abortion. But the change in tone from the Vatican in this interview is enormous. Bruni noticed that the Pope “didn't present himself as someone with all the answers. . . . he recognized that authority can come from a mix of sincerity and humility as much as from any blazing, blinding conviction, and that stature is a respect you earn, not a pedestal you grab.” Carol Zinn, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (criticized by former Pope Benedict), stated: “What we're seeing is an incredible change in the atmosphere. And when you have change in the atmosphere, it's amazing what kinds of things can unfold.”³ I agree. I think Pope Francis has the potential to bring about great change in our world, and the way he's changing the atmosphere is through language.

As two other reporters put it, the Pope “is assuming the tone of a parish priest.” That means that he's presenting himself as more concerned with actual people than with upholding church doctrine. He has become a pastoral presence in the world. All parish priests assume a very large pastoral role, in caring for the members of their congregations. “Pastoral” from “pastor” derives from the Latin pascere, meaning to feed. Shepherds physically feed their flocks; pastors spiritually feed their congregants. It's an old metaphor in the Church, but Pope Francis is using it in a new way. Thus, the Pope can assert that too much is being made of church doctrines on abortion, gay marriage, contraception. He keeps returning in this interview to the greater importance of the spiritual health of the people than abstract doctrines; the interviewer states that Francis is concerned when “the rules threaten to overwhelm the spirit.”

The Pope uses some very telling metaphors in the interview. In reference to the consequences of the Church putting rules above the spiritual health of the people, Francis says: “I see clearly that the thing the church most needs today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after a battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. . . . And you have to start from the ground up.” Beautiful. A suffering person cannot be healed by abstract doctrine; he or she needs a pastor on the spot who cares for his or her soul (or psyche), before he cares for how exactly that person abides by church doctrines. That is why the Pope has turned away from judging homosexual people; he is more concerned with the state of their souls than with their sexual orientation. This is true compassion, humility, a recognition that we are all struggling mortals and equal in that regard. As Francis has said, “I need to live my life with others.” And he cites the thought of St. Ignatius, the founder of his own Jesuit order: “great principles must be embodied in the circumstances of place, time, and people.” Thus, Francis understands that even doctrine must change with time and events, that the Church consists of the people and the hierarchy of priests, bishops, etc. For this reason, “We should not even think . . . that 'thinking with the church' means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.” What theologians think of the Virgin Mary is often different from what the people think of the Virgin Mary, but both are part of the larger truth. This seems to me to be a radical change in vision; I do believe the Pope is implying that the people have a say in the meanings and values asserted by the church as a whole.

Amazingly, given the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope believes that “Religion has the right to express its opinions in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.” This is apparently true because no one walks in another person's shoes, experiences another person's life in a concrete way. Thus no one, even priest or pope, can judge another—only try to walk with that person with mercy: “It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.” Throughout the interview we see this emphasis on caring for the real person as more important than imposing certain doctrines on that person and judging that person by those doctrines. No individual can live up to abstract doctrine, as we have seen quite clearly in the scandals among Catholic priests and bishops in the recent past. To assert that anyone can be perfect is hypocrisy; the Pope says his most essential characteristic is that he is a sinner. In truth, one has to be consciously a sinner in order to be compassionate toward others. C. G. Jung has differentiated between perfection and completion.⁴ While many in the Vatican have oriented their lives toward perfection, including Francis's predecessor, who wanted a more limited church of true believers, Pope Francis is seeking completion. To him, the church should be universal; it should belong to everyone. And this can only happen by not insisting on or even seriously aspiring toward the unattainable goal of perfection. But the main value of completion, as opposed to perfection, is that it allows growth, whereas perfection produces stagnation. As the Pope puts it, “In ecumenical relations it is important not only to know each other better, but also to recognize what the Spirit has sown in the other as a gift for us.” Again, beautiful.

Francis understands God as being in the present as a “'concrete' God. . . God is to be encountered in the world of today.” And since God continues to reveal himself through history in all the moments of the present as they pass, certainty and even absolute doctrine do not make sense in understanding the movements of God. “. . . God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. . . . If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. . . . Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. . . You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.” Amazing! This is a courageous man whom we really need to continue to speak out in this world of sectarian violence and hatred.

According to Pope Francis, God is more process than certain truth—an ongoing revelation: “God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. . . . human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. . . . we grow in understanding of the truth. . . . The view of the church's teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.” And doctrines must always be renewed by contact with real people, especially for Francis the poor, or what Christ called “the least” of us. “When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human . . . .” Thus, Francis says he prays even when sitting in the dentist's office, a setting that might surely remind us of our common suffering, mortal nature.

I am not a Catholic--never have been and never will be, but this man moves me to hope that we can better ourselves as human beings, by tempering our rules and laws and paying most attention to caring for other human beings—by being pastors ourselves, each of us toward the other. Isn't that really Christ's message, in its essence? And this is the attitude of metaphorical thought, which anchors the abstract in the concrete. Pope Francis uses several striking metaphors in his interview, but I'd like to focus finally on one in particular, which he repeats. In commenting on a description of the vision of St. Ignatius (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”), Francis notes “. . . we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are.” In that imagery is a description of metaphor itself: a vision of the abstract (the horizon and all we project onto it) anchored by our position in the real world, in a certain place and time. What we can know about the horizon and all it represents is dependent upon our roots in this world, and what the horizon represents takes on value in relation to our roots in this world. Or, as Christ said, “. . . as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40, RSV).

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-popes-radical-whisper.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130922

2Quotes from the interview in this spot are taken from “A Big Heart Open to God,” in America, retrieved online at

http://www.americamagazine.org/print/156341 . Copyright America Press, 2013.

The interview was conducted in the Vatican by Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and translated from Italian into English by Massimo Faggioli, Sarah Christopher Faggioli, Dominic Robinson, SJ, and Griffin Oleynick.

3Carol Zinn's quote and the quote from two reporters in the next paragraph are taken from

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/world/europe/with-his-remarks-on-sexual-morality-a-surprise-pope-keeps-on-surprising.html?pagewanted=all

4C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, ed. 2, tr. R. F. C. Hull (NY: Bollingen, 1969), pg. 33: “. . . just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile.”

Authority & Responsibility

As the last soldiers of World War II die off, it's worthwhile to review the mental states of the Nazis, of those who thought it was not only acceptable but even admirable to participate in genocide. Recently the New York Times ran an obituary for Rochus Misch, one of Hitler's bodyguards. Apparently Misch lived openly and happily in post-war German society, often visiting the bunker where Hitler died and bragging that he was there! But what really caught my attention was this statement by Misch: “I ask you, if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Fuhrer? How is it possible?”¹ Fuhrer means leader in German; Misch is expressing incredulity that any person could accept that the leader of the Germans (“our Fuhrer”) could have done “terrible things.” To people like Misch, leaders are seen by definition or out of necessity as infallible. Such willful blindness arises, surely in part, out of fear of the dissolution of society without a strong and trusted leader. An emphasis on loyalty, to groups and leaders, is a marker of the conservative mentality even today, while liberals tend to value fairness over loyalty.²

The danger of placing too much trust in authority is not only the very great tendency of power to corrupt those who assume it, but also the excuse it can give those subordinate to that power not to have to think for themselves, and Misch is a good example of the latter problem. That power corrupts is not just a cliché. Brian Resnick published an interesting article in The Atlantic recently that summarized recent laboratory studies on the phenomenon of power, titled “How Power Corrupts the Mind.”³ Perhaps in part because authorities have to look at the big picture, “powerful people . . . tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences.” Often, Resnick reports, because they are not so closely linked to the actual lives of others, being cocooned in their authority, powerful people tend to develop the traits of hypocrisy, infidelity, and dishonesty. We need only look to politics and, recently, some religions, to see how this scenario develops, unfortunately. People to whom certain authority figures, such as a priest, carry great value at times will deny their own observations and the reports of their own children to preserve the power of the authority. Then, great tragedies can occur. Can you see the connection to metaphor here? To overlook the negative effects on your child in order to preserve authority is essentially a yielding to the abstract and neglecting the concrete.

Misch's words also reminded me of Hannah Arendt's works on the mentality of the Nazis, in particular her chilling observation on the “banality of evil.” In a recent article on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,⁴ Roger Berkowitz reminds us of what Arendt observed and recorded during that trial: Eichmann's “evil acts were motivated by thoughtlessness that was neither stupidity nor bureaucratic obedience, but a staggering inability to see the world beyond Nazi cliches. . . . an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.” Again, power allows an individual to disconnect himself from the experiences of other human beings. Berkowitz continues:

“The insight of Eichmann in Jerusalem is not that Eichmann was just following orders, but that

Eichmann was a 'joiner.' In his own words, Eichmann feared 'to live a leaderless and difficult

individual life,' in which 'I would receive no directives from anybody.' [To Arendt, Eichmann

was] an ideologue, someone who will sacrifice his own moral convictions when they come in

conflict with the 'idea' of the movement that gives life meaning.”

And, importantly, Eichmann saw his actions of buttressing the movement (including genocide, which he admitted to be evil) as “a heroic burden demanded by his idealism,” which he called “the fatherland morality.” Thus, he “relied on his oath to Hitler and the Nazi flag, a bond he calls 'the highest duty.'”

So, Berkowitz summarizes: Eichmann “acted thoughtlessly and dutifully . . . convinced that he was sacrificing an easy morality [do not kill] for a higher good [fatherland]. . . . Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats but by 'joiners.' That need . . . originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. . . . Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists [ideologues] to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.”

Other than the last sentence, this description could be of the Tea Partiers of today, or even just strict conservatives in Congress, couldn't it? And some violence is perpetrated by our current ideologues, isn't it?--both physical (bombing abortion clinics, shooting abortion providers) and psychological (warning of government death squads). And the people who engage in such activities are, indeed, very proud of themselves for their defense of “traditional values.” They seem to be quite blind to the fact that not harming others is also a traditional value: Do unto others . . . . As for the role of technology mentioned by Berkowitz, consider this statement by Thomas Nagel:
“ . . . science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of

beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born

5,000 years ago. . . . we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we

expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them

to be good?”⁵

I don't think this is an exaggeration. I had an experience some time ago, in which someone apparently spread a lie about me over the social media. After experiencing shunning and other negative effects, I tried to find out what was said about me and who said it. One young man I spoke to about this said, with a smile, “Why do you want to blame one person, when we were all involved?” This attitude concerns me quite a bit. It reveals that an individual can hide from responsibility for individual action in a group and that a group will believe the reports of an individual within that group and act on it (and even consider it fun) without bothering to verify the report by discussing it with the accused person. This is another case of abstraction. I do not really know who my accuser was or exactly what that person said; I can do nothing about it because the concrete experience of facing my accuser is not available to me because of the anonymity of social media. Also, the individuals who embrace the “movement” of social media, if I can echo Berkowitz's term in that way, apparently feel no concern for me as a physical being who has been psychologically and socially insulted. I'm an adult and can deal with it, but what about all those adolescents who show up in the news after harming or killing themselves because of abuse via social media?

This is a serious problem. Arendt had something to say about a phenomenon like this as well: “What stuck in the minds [of men like Eichmann was] simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.” As a college teacher and mother of two young adults, I know that young people today are quite conscious of participating in a paradigm shift. They seem not to have too much concern about individual responsibility and privacy; they are very much engaged in the sharing of selves and information in an awesome new world. I am concerned that they do not see the possible downsides of this phenomenon yet—after all, they were pretty much born into a world of great technological powers; they take it as their norm, even though they realize that historically it is quite a mind-blowing time. Again, to the extent that technology leads us humans to ignore the physical and psychological realities on the ground of others, it will lead us into abstractions that will far too easily overlook the sufferings of some in order to reenforce the movement. Humans have never before had such powers, and so we believe this really is a new and different world that commands new ways of behaving and a new ethics. It's way too easy to believe this and not to see how deferral to authority or to abstraction has caused very great problems in the past and probably still can do so today if we are not thoughtful and watchful.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was a defender of religion in the modern world; indeed, he credited the Polish people's strong Catholicism with their ability to eventually turn back totalitarian Soviet rule. But note how he phrases this admiration: “For me, the religious dimension is extremely important. I feel that everything depends on whether people are pious or not pious. Reverence toward being, which can be formulated in strictly religious terms or more general terms, that is the basic value. Piety protects us against nihilism.”⁶ Personally, I'm happier with Gaia than with God, if only because the problem of authority is not so great when thinking of earth as one integrated organism, whereas God will always have his priests and zealots. Either way, “reverence toward being” is the key—recognizing that no matter how much power you have you are not worth any more than the least powerful person on earth and that the daily realities of that least powerful person must be considered and respected as much as yours are. The word “piety” comes from the Latin for “pity” and is related to “compassion.” If we can see ourselves all as created beings, part of one whole creation—none more important than any other, essentially, we may have a chance. We must always anchor the abstract in the concrete, in being itself, lest we defeat ourselves with our very intelligence.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/europe/rochus-misch-bodyguard-of-hitler-dies-at-96.html?emc=eta1

2http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/the-whistle-blowers-quandary.html

3http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/how-power-corrupts-the-mind/277638/

4http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?emc=eta1

5http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/books/review/john-grays-silence-of-animals.html?pagewanted=all

6http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/feb/27/an-interview-with-czeslaw-milosz/

Seamus Heaney

I was the sort of child who found more satisfying relationships in books than in real life, on the whole—and certainly more rewarding understandings of reality in books than in the social world I inhabited. I got vicarious satisfaction, for instance, from the power Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames had in their lives—how they were free to act out of their own understandings of the world.

As an adult I have received great pleasure and affirmation from the writer–reader relationship in poetry and from the depths and variations of perception and insight that poetry can make possible. Seamus Heaney was coming into his own as an internationally recognized poet just as I was initiating my own academic career in literature. I had the honest pleasure of meeting Heaney several times, once sitting next to him and conversing (as he later put it in his typically concrete way) “on the cusp of that formal horse-shoe bend at lunch.”¹

Seamus Heaney was an unpretentious man who lived in a very sensual world. His poetry is anchored in imagery and metaphor to a greater extent than for most poets. For Heaney, a “spirit level” (for instance) is not only the thing itself (what we call here a carpenter's level), but also the intangible concept the words evoke. I learned most of what I appreciate in metaphor from his poetry.

Heaney's poetry is mostly simple on the surface and very deep--comprehensible because anchored in the everyday images of this world, to which both poet and reader can respond sensually, via the five senses in the imagination. Simplicity in literature is mostly derided, especially in poetry, by academics. It is an achievement most poets and academics could never approach and thus dismiss.

But it gives hope to those who can accept it and see into it—hope that we tortured, bifurcated bags of flesh and bones and blood and brains can live with meaning, metaphorically, with our feet planted in the ground of our origins and our heads swaying in the passing winds of ideas. Seamus Heaney wrote two poems about the mythical character Antaeus², son of Gaia, who could not be killed as long as he maintained contact with his mother Earth, “cradled in the dark that wombed me / And nurtured in every artery / Like a small hillock.” It is only Hercules who can defeat Antaeus, Hercules who

. . . lifts his arms

in a remorseless V

. . . lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,

a sleeping giant,

pap for the dispossessed.

I gather some hope from this ending, despite its apparent agony of loss for those of us who are not “sky-born and royal,” like Hercules, son of Zeus, nursed by Hera. Heaney specifies that despite Hercules' triumph, Antaeus is not dead but sleeping, thus revising the myth that has Hercules smother Antaeus by breaking his ribs while he is elevated.

I cannot help but feel that we are becoming the dispossessed, that we are dispossessing ourselves from our native, physical world. Like Heaney's Antaeus, though, I hope we are just sleeping and that we will escape one day the very powerful grasp of the abstract realm and understand the vital necessity of our relationship with the natural world—not only for our own continuance as a species in this world but also for our ability to see and share through metaphor the greater values and meanings that emanate from this world. It is our “pap” and always will be.

With the death of Seamus Heaney this past week, we have lost a spiritual companion, a truly alert and hopeful soul, who loved this awful, aweful world. Thankfully, we can still be nourished with his words.

1Personal letter.

2The first and third quotes to follow are from the poem “Antaeus,” the second from the poem “Hercules and Antaeus,” both from the volume North (1975).