"Has It Ever Occurred to You..."

I want to thank Jerome Doolittle over at Bad Attitudes, a blog of pointed snippets and commentary I've been reading for years, for pointing me to this article on Psychology Today's blogsite.

Normally, I read/skim posts from the Wisblog Roll on the right side of this page, absorb the information, chase down the links, and continue on my merry way. When I read Doolittle's post the subject struck a chord with me, but I didn't have the time to run down the reference. And I was haunted by it the entire weekend. When I got back to my computer, I couldn't remember where I had originally seen it. I had to page through several of my regular haunts until I found it.

Here's the money quote:

Dunning and Kruger often refer to a “double curse” when interpreting their findings: People fail to grasp their own incompetence, precisely because they are so incompetent. And since, overcoming their incompetence would first require the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence people get stuck in a vicious cycle. 

“The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own.”

I realize that PT has what I would call an "empathy bias", that is to say they don't necessarily see the Gohmerts, Palins, and Becks of the world as knaves, but rather as fools deserving of our understanding. They are granted a certain amount of cultural 'authority' by virtue of their having access to the megaphone of politics and media PR and are allowed to say, or repeat, whatever talking point some political handler or PR flack has put in front of them. To PT, their lies are not lies (because they don't necessarily know what they are saying is false), they simply don't know any better and, in fact, because of their self-regard do not even recognize that they could be wrong. More's the pity.

The problem of assertive, self-confident, self-righteous ignorance has long been a puzzler for me. How do you deal with people for whom the concept of a shared, factual reality is foreign? People for whom the notion of truth is simply irrelevant or at least subsidiary to an emotionally satisfying 'gotcha' point? Especially when they are politically aggressive and noisy and well-funded. Especially when they make every effort to avoid inconvenient facts.

This is quite possibly the central problem Socrates (via Plato) addressed 2500+ years ago in the nascent democracy of ancient Athens:

Sophistry + Rhetoric + PR vs. Truth + Logic + Reality.

Quaint, I know, but the Protagoras is still relevant today.

Socrates was famous for asking questions like 'What does it mean to lead a good life?' 'What is excellence (or virtue), and how important is its pursuit in everything I am and do?' and 'What does it mean to "know thyself"?' These are the sorts of questions that any self-aware person should constantly be asking themselves so they don't fall into the trap of ignorance and bias. It is a philosophical attitude. One that helps a person understand when they might be wrong or mistaken.

The authors of the PT article identify the sort of ignorance into which these types of question simply cannot enter.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence.

A correlate of this Dunning-Kruger effect might possibly explain how roughly 40% of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1% financially and thus how they can be duped by political con artists into voting against their own economic self-interest.

Sure, it's possible to argue over what is or isn't a fact, what may or may not be true, what the nature of reality is, what is or isn't a logical solution. And those are the sorts of arguments we should be having in the public sphere. But when we get into the realm of ignorance, emotional manipulation, blind faith, false premises, preconceived notions, self-serving prejudices, ideologically based propaganda, etc., dialogue—and, more importantly, real societal progress—becomes difficult if not impossible. An emotionally satisfying argument is not necessarily the best.

Critical thinking, logic (Aristotelian/classical/propositional as well as symbolic), rhetoric (its uses and abuses) need to be an integral part of every person's education to help them break out of this vicious cycle of ignorance and prepare them for the public sphere of life in a nominally democratic society such as ours. But the question is: how can we inculcate these sorts of values/virtues in a society/culture in which they are not prized and, in fact, in which there are wealthy and powerful interests arrayed against them?

Theology De-mythologized

Here is everything you need to know about the four major Western religions in a nutshell:

Moses (most likely 1391–1271 BCE), a member of the royal family in pharoahnic Egypt, organized a slave revolt, liberated the enslaved populace, and established them as a unitary, theocratic nation with a code of laws which governed the actions of kings as well as subjects.

Siddhartha Gautama (most likely 563 - 483 BCE), aka the Buddha, a high-born prince from what is now Nepal, renounced his worldly possessions and family and inheritance once he became conscious of the suffering of the poor and outcast.

Jesus (most likely 2 BCE - 30 CE), aka the Christ, a Middle Eastern rural carpenter's son, took the criminal rap for his friends and family and sacrificed his own life, suffering a brutal execution at the hands of the state, for their sakes.

Muhammad (570 - 632), a merchant from the Arabian peninsula, raised an army and conquered and unified an unruly, polytheistic, pagan tribal region under a unified code of behavior and devotion to a single god.

There is a lot of gobbledy gook surrounding these persons and events—myths and scriptures and teachings and doctrines and interpretations and factions and whatnot—but what it all boils down to is this: militarism and legalism are the key themes in the founding myths of Judaism and Islam; self-sacrifice and empathy for the suffering of others are central to the origins of Buddhism and Christianity.

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FN. I realize Buddhism is not strictly a Western religion, but it is 'major' in the West.

The Mosaic Sadness, Part 2

[cont'd from previous post]

The Mosaic Sadness is the emotional condition of our mortality. When we realize failure is our destiny—incompletion, disappointment—it is the inevitable response. At the end of life, we may, however, get a chance to look back at all our successes and our failures and realize how puny they all are. And, if we are as fortunate as Moses, we may catch a glimpse of the Promised Land on Canaan's side, to wit: what fulfillment, satisfaction, liberation, community, and success might look like. What the future might hold.

Franz Kafka was exquisitely aware of this condition. It marks much of his best, most enigmatic, writing. And it plagues his later diaries.

"Of all writers Kafka was possibly the most cunning: he, at least, was never had! To start with, unlike many modern writers, he wanted to be a writer. He realised that literature, which was what he wanted, denied him the satisfaction he expected, but he never stopped writing. We cannot even say that literature disappointed him. It did not disappoint him – not, at any rate, in comparison with other possible goals. For him, literature was what the promised land was for Moses. ‘The fact that he was not to see the Promised Land until just before his death is incredible,’ Kafka wrote about Moses in his diary. ‘The sole significance of this last view is to show how imperfect an instant human life is – imperfect, because this aspect of life (the expectation of the Promised Land) could last indefinitely without ever appearing to be more than an instant. Moses did not fail to reach Canaan because his life was too short, but because his was a human life.’ This is no longer a mere denunciation of the vanity of one ‘aspect of life’, but of the vanity of all endeavours, which are equally senseless: an endeavour is always as hopeless in time as a fish in water. It is a mere point in the movement of the universe, for we are dealing with a human life." G. Bataille, "Should Kafka Be Burnt?" in Literature and Evil @ 152.

On Kafka's view, per Batille, this Mosaic sadness is our existential situation: the water in which we qua fish swim. An ironic, violent, trickster god denies us our heart's desire despite our faithfulness to this god's calling, and only because of our finite humanity—a finitude into which this selfsame god has capriciously flung us (out of, I might add, pique). It is a profoundly religious point of view: nothing we can do can or even should move the great god. And that's probably as it should be.

Though it should not be a call for self-pity. If this life were the paradise of the Promised Land, there would be no need to strive to better ourselves or our condition. Aspiration would be irrelevant, rendered moot by perfection.

This is entirely in keeping with the theory of literature I've put forth on this blog under the Label Ur-story. Dealing with this existential situation of Mosaic sadness—the recognition and acknowledgement of our mortality—is the substance of literature, and I've attempted to show how a number writers have adressed it.

In the notion of Mosaic sadness, we find the convergence of both theology and literature. It is at the root of what it means to be human, and at the same time it implies our limitation.

We do not live forever. We will not live forever. Some god has decreed it. We can, however, imagine what it might mean to have eternal life, to reach the Promised Land. However, if we are true to ourselves and our situation, we must acknowledge and learn to cope with the foundational sadness that is our essence.

Religious traditions have tried to provide a salve, a consolation, in the form of a Heaven or a Paradise in an afterlife. Look beyond this cruel situation: hope lies in the great beyond. This is their ultimate interpretation of the existential quandary.

Literature details the varied responses of flawed human beings within the finitude of this life to this situation. Get angry. Go to war. Take intriguing journeys. Suffer and moan. Laugh. Love. Seek clues to solve great mysteries. Imagine an alternate reality. Dream the future.

But what if Canaan isn't all it's promised to be?

The Kafka diary entry quoted by Bataille is dated October 19, 1921. Not three weeks later, Kafka sinks even further into existential despair. On second thought, what if the Promised Land is not all it it's cracked up to be? And the wilderness is still Wilderness? In his diary entry of January 28, 1922, he writes:

"...I am already a citizen in this other world, which is related to the ordinary world as the wilderness is to cultivated land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan), look back as a foreigner, am of course also in that other world—that I have brought along as paternal inheritance—the smallest and the most anxious one and am only capable of living there because of the special organization there, according to which even for the lowliest ones there are exaltations that come like lightning, of course also millenial shatterings that crush like the weight of the sea. Should I not be thankful in spite of everything? Would I have had to find my way here? Could I have not been crushed at the border through 'banishment' there, combined with refusal here. Was not because of my father's power the expulsion so strong that nothing could withstand it (not me)? Of course, it is like a reversed wandering in the wilderness and with childish hopes (especially with regard to women): 'I shall nevertheless perhaps remain in Canaan' and meanwhile I have been in the wilderness for a long time, and there are only visions of despair, especially in those times when even there I am the most miserable one of all, and Canaan must represent itself as the only land of hope, for there is no third land for human beings."

Kafka's sadness is double: "Canaan requires conformity, and the desert, which may provide refuge from the misery of Canaan, cannot protect against despair and illusory hopes." B. Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness @ 63-64.

Moses at least had hope—for his people, if not for himself.

Poor, deluded Moses.

(to be continued)


[Yay! The YouTubes!]

TELEVISION
"Marquee Moon"

(Verlaine)

I remember
how the darkness doubled
I recall
lightning struck itself.
I was listening
listening to the rain
I was hearing
hearing something else.

Life in the hive puckered up my night,
the kiss of death, the embrace of life.
There I stand neath the Marquee Moon Just waiting,
Hesitating...
I ain't waiting

I spoke to a man
down at the tracks.
I asked him
how he don't go mad.
He said "Look here junior, don't you be so happy.
And for Heaven's sake, don't you be so sad."

Well a Cadillac
it pulled out of the graveyard.
Pulled up to me
all they said get in.
Then the Cadillac
it puttered back into the graveyard.
And me,
I got out again.

The Mosaic Sadness, Part 1

"This is the land I vowed to Abram, Isaac, and Jacob," Yahweh said to him. "'To your seed I will give it,' were my words. It is revealed to your eyes, though your body cannot follow." Moses, servant of Yahweh, died there, in Moab's land, following Yahweh's word. Now he buried him there, in the clay of Moab's land, in a gorge facing Beth-peor: no man has ever seen his grave, to this day. (The Book of J @ 178 (trans. David Rosenberg)

[Moshe was 120 years old when he died, with eyes undimmed and vigor undiminished." (Deuteronomy @ 34:7 CJV]

This passage depicts the death of one of the truly great world-historical (or mytho-historical, or both, depending on your point of view) figures of the ancient Near East. A reluctant, ironic leader, at least three of the world's great religions venerate him as the founder of monotheism—Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten excepted. According to the Bible, he negotiated, organized, and led the great exodus of a loosely knit band of Semitic tribes from Pharoanic slavery and, in exile in the wilderness, forged their identity as a nation in thrall to the great god Yahweh. Shepherd, fabulist, magician, miracle worker, liberator, prophet, law-giver, judge, political leader, murderer, warrior/general: these titles have survived five thousand years attached to this man we know as Moses.

In the passage here, Yahweh leads Moses to the top of Mt. Nebo and shows him the proverbial Promised Land—the lands of the Covenant that Yahweh had promised to the Israelites' racial progenitors, Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, in antiquity. Yet, He tells Moses he may not enter this country. The Book of J does not specify why, but later redactors, editors, and commentators allow it is because Moses disobeyed Yahweh in some petty, self-serving manner. There, looking out over the Jordan River, Moses died alone and unremarked in some anonymous ditch.

Moses, whose eyes were unclouded, could see the Promised Land, and even though he was still active, Yahweh refused to let him enter. A congenital stutterer, Moses had mustered all his persuasive powers to negotiate the liberation of the people and serve as their leader, all in service to Yahweh and in reliance on His promise. He remained true to his calling, even though at times his temper and ego got the better of him, and led the people to the very cusp of Canaan.

It's been said there's nothing worse than to die sad and alone. The sadness Moses must've felt there at the end of his life as he looked out over the Promised Land—allegedly 120 years old—knowing he could not go in; the deep disappointment Moses must've felt when he realized Yahweh had no intention of keeping His promise vis-à-vis Moses despite his lifetime of dedicated service; the overwhelming grief that must've consumed Moses in his loneliness as he tumbled into a gorge and died: this is what I shall call 'The Mosaic Sadness.'

(to be continued)

Beyond Belief

Well, we all certainly had tons of self-righteous fun making sport of the self-righteous end-of-time true-believers who predicted the Rapture of the Elect would occur recently, specifically May 21, 2011, heralding a five-month period of Tribulations for the Remainder which would end with the end of the world on October 21, 2011. By all accounts, however, there was no Rapture. No reports of mysteriously missing people or tombs being opened and the dead in Christ ascending bodily to Heaven. And now the good folks who brought you this latest scare are re-jiggering their Biblical accounts in the hopes of coming up with a new last date.

I am not so much interested in the whole timing issue here as in the notion of the belief system that leads these and suchlike people to assert, in the face of so much countervailing physical evidence, such certainties.

Belief is a very powerful notion. For plenty of Christians, belief is transformative (-ational): if the Individual believes in Jesus Christ as his/her personal savior, s/he will transcend the physical certainty of death by being resurrected intact bodily from the dead, ascend to Heaven, and live eternally in the presence of God. All it takes is belief. The sole difference between an eternity of Paradise (existence with God) and an eternity of Torment (either non-existence, existence without God, or existence with Satan—depending on your flavor of belief) is whether you hold this belief at some point during the few short years of your existence here on Planet Eartsnop. That's a lot of stress on that one notion.

The belief that the Individual's sense of identity perdures even after the atomization of its physical embodiment is foundational to Western religions. The belief that holding a certain belief in this temporal lifetime is determinative of one's eternal fate is structural. The belief as to what the substance of this certain belief must be (i.e., that Jesus Christ died to absolve one of one's condition of original guilt) is superstructural.

What does this adamance about belief tell us about ourselves?

Believing is a subjective mental act. When I believe something, I insist that it is true—regardless of proof. Any notion I hold which has not been proven is properly said to be a belief of mine. Though philosophers are more or less parsimonious about the thresholds of admissible proof, beliefs are said to be true or false depending on how they can be shown to correlate with facts or proofs. I can have a true belief even if it has not yet been proven true—so long as it has not been falsified, I merely await its verification (of course, I may never find out that it is true—that's a matter of luck). Once a belief has been confirmed it can be called knowledge, and a belief to the contrary is a false belief.

For some beliefs we can imagine what a proof of their truth might look like, or what it might take to falsify them. Other beliefs, however, allow of no proofs. They can never be falsified. Such are the beliefs of our end-timers. There is no evidence that could prove or disprove their belief that Jesus's self-sacrifice saves us from our condition of Original Sin (itself an unfalsifiable belief); there is no evidence that the subjective mental act of believing can make a difference in our eternal salvation; there is no evidence that our individual identities outlast our physical extinguishment. And there can be none. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary: our identities die with our bodies. We have no privileged vantage point either into or from eternity and its eternal verities to judge otherwise. The only confirmation these folks can have will come long after we're all dead and in a realm to which we have no present access.

Yet they persist in their beliefs. In fact, they are defined by them. And here's where we learn something about ourselves from these end-timers and their adherence to these absurd-on-their-face claims: what we believe is determinative of who we are, not what we know. This may be the central notion of identity in Western culture, over and above social, ethnic, racial, gender, communal, political, or even religious issues. The things I believe that have not been confirmed (or even that have been falsified) are the things that define who I am.

This notion of a personal identity that survives the certainty of death goes back at least as far as the great Pharoahs of ancient Egypt. It is the subject matter of the oldest extant story: the motivation of Gilgamesh's epic quest for immortality in his unquenchable grief for Enkidu, his dead friend, which I've discussed as part of my Ur-story series on literature.

The post-Enlightenment West is nothing if not a scientific, knowledge-based society. The rise of knowledge has crowded out many false beliefs. And with this change the very notion of personal identity has come under attack. For example, it's difficult to reconcile the bodily ascension to Heaven of either Jesus or Mary when we know that physical bodies are subject to a cosmic speed limit; that is to say, neither Jesus's nor Mary's body can be more than 2,000 light years from here, and, by all indications, Heaven is somewhere beyond this physical plane.

But I digress. Those who cling to beliefs that have either been proven false or are not subject to confirmation experience a very real sense of uncertainty, a lack of self-assurance, a weak sense of self and self-esteem. Knowledge is a direct challenge to their identity. They reassert their beliefs as a way of shoring up their loss of identity. They become more adamant in their beliefs in order to assert an identity against the prevailing societal norms.

Indeed, our very identities are tied into our beliefs at a very profound level. Knowledge, because it is verifiable, is social and objective by definition. No community, however, is required to obtain it, merely education. Beliefs, on the other hand, are personal and subjective. Sharing beliefs is a profoundly social affair and is a way of creating community, but they are not publicly provable.

If we have no beliefs, if we accept only what we know to be true (or at least probable, given the scandal of inductive reasoning and empirical proof) do we have any identity as individuals? Maybe not in the ancient sense, or the eternal sense. But this is what makes us modern.

Thanksgiving

Being that Gabriel Josipovici is who all the kool kids seem to be turning to, I thought I would as well. Doing so, I discovered this:

"In order to understand that there are good reasons for the difficulties they encountered getting their work not just published but written, and that these difficulties are part and parcel of what makes them rewarding to read, we have to try and see Modernism not from without, as Gay, Corbett, and Goldstucker and the post-Modernist[] (sic) choose to see it, but from within." (Whatever Happened to Modernism, p. 8)

Cold comfort that, seeing as I just received the following rejection by email re: my as yet unagented, unpublished novel EULOGY:

"Thanks so much for offering me the chance to consider your material. Unfortunately, your project doesn't seem right for me. Since it's crucial that you find an agent who will represent you to the best of his or her ability, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to step aside rather than ask to represent your manuscript.



You have a great imagination - I love the premise - and you're a good writer, but I'm sad to say that I just wasn't passionate enough about this to ask to see more. I wish I could offer constructive suggestions, but I thought the dialogue was fine, the characters well-crafted, and the plot well-conceived. I think it's the kind of thing that really is subjective - why some people adore the book on the top of the NYTimes bestseller list, and others don't."

The modernism in my writing offputs the sorts of people who make life-and-death decisions about texts, the gate-keepers. It does not excite their passions (sound familiar?). They don't "identify" with the characters or find them somehow sympathetic (complexity and depth notwithstanding). Imagination, conception, writing, dialogue, characters, plot. What am I missing?

Gaaaaah! Just shoot me.

---------------------

For those of you not on these shores, this upcoming Thursday is the celebration of Thanksgiving here in America. For many, it's a four-day weekend filled with feasting, football, family, and friends. Despite its secular nature, it is our one truly religious holiday. Let me explain.

Reading Josipovici's analysis of the desacralization of the quotidian (what he calls, after Weber, "the disenchantment of the world") alongside Jose Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda (a historical novel set in the early 1800's in Portugal which enacts that self-same sense of the sacred in the everyday lives of its characters), I am reminded of what I, as an avowed agnostic, actually believe is the truth of Religion (with a capital 'R'): it acknowledges and ritualizes our sense of awe at the impressive majesty of the creation, from quarkian particles to the multiverse (something about each of which can be found with relative ease on this blog), and, at the same time, it inculcates a sense of gratitude in our stony souls (a term I use advisedly).

Thanksgiving eponymously calls us to this latter. The sense of thankfulness, in its religious articulation, is the explicit acknowledgement of something beyond the self—in fact, it is the recognition of a debt to everyone and everything that has come before us and made us what we are, for good or ill, at this particular point in time and this particular place. It opens us up to the world and humbles us. At the same time, an attitude of gratitude (sorry) can awaken, prefigure, and even shape within the self an even more profound sense of empathy for each other and all of creation, the state to which all true religions aspire.

Thank someone for something this weekend; you'll feel better.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Best wishes to all for a Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, a hymn with angelic voices:WoW will be dark for the next few days over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Why They Hate Us

1,073,741,824. One billion plus.

This is the number of ancestors you had, theoretically, approximately 600 years ago, sometime around 1400. How did I arrive at this figure? Simple: you have two parents, each of them has two parents (4), each of them has two parents (8), each of them has two parents (16), and so on for approximately 30 generations (@20yrs).

But there's a problem. According to the best available estimates, at that time there were only about 350,000,000 people alive. Three-hundred-fifty million, slightly more than one-third of the number of your theoretical ancestors. "Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived." Or so says Steve Olson in an article published several years back in The Atlantic Monthly: "The Royal We." What gives?

Intermarriage, intermingling of family trees, etc. Fine. Yet, there is a mathematical issue.

"In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," [Joseph] Chang [a statistician] showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today."

Everyone today who has any trace of European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne (the Holy Grail, if you will, of genealogical research). And Muhammad: "The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist," says Olson.

Further, as a matter of statistical certainty, everyone alive today is descended from Abraham and David and Confuscius and Nefertiti:

"the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors."

So, how does it feel to have royal, even divine blood? Feels pretty good, doesn't it? It gives you a real sense of self-esteem, n'est pas? A sense of pride and confidence. Even a sense of privilege. And that's the problem. This February 12th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) offended everyone who felt they had a drop of noble blood because at some level nobility is associated with divinity.

Throughout the history of Western civilization, royalty embellished their claims to rule over others by tracing their ancestral roots to the gods. Today's most blatant example is the Pope of the Roman Catholic sect who claims his authority comes from Peter, to whom Jesus the Divine purportedly gave the keys of heaven: "Behold he [Peter] received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing is committed to him, the care of the whole Church and its government is given to him [cura ei totius Ecclesiae et principatus committitur (Epist., lib. V, ep. xx, in P.L., LXXVII, 745)].

Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code plays on this myth of divine sanction, articulating the counter-myth that Charlemagne was the direct physical descendant of Jesus through the line of Mary Magdalene—which claim, of course, is a direct challenge to the spiritual authority arrogated to itself by the Roman church. Prior to this, the Roman Emperors, of course, formalized the model, relying heavily on the divine sanction for their authority. The Divine Augustus, the apotheosis of Nero, etc.

Jesus, as far as I can tell, was the first commoner/plebeian/peasant to be claimed to be a direct divine descendant; and, in the eyes of much of the Christian church, this elevated him to royalty. King Jesus. But this is confusing. In the New Testament, the books of Matthew and Luke make some attempt to trace Jesus's genealogy back through Joseph to David and, thus, Abraham and even Adam; but that makes no sense if his "father" was the Holy Spirit of God and not the icky, spermy Joseph. Either Jesus had a divine ancestor, arguably, in Adam, the first man, or Jesus's lineage represented a break in the chain of ancestry as the divine acted directly in the womb of his mother, Mary.

The tradition, of course, is much older, however. The Greek gods were continually meddling in the affairs of mortals and begetting spawn who were destined to rule over the people. There's a long history in the ancient Near East, as well. The so-called 'Divine Right of Kings' was but a modern shadow of the persistence of this myth.

Suffice it to say: Nobility, Royalty, Divinity: they are all inextricably intertwined in Western history. It can be quite confusing to us poor non-elites. 'Divinity' mythologizes the right of one person or one group to hold sway over another group. 'Divinity' authorizes rulership.

Then, along came Darwin. His work smashed this myth, waking humanity from its great slumber of irreality. There are truly no divine origins, no divinely sanctioned royalty, no exclusive nobility. We all have the same origins. We are all, in essence, of the animal kingdom. Human, all too human. It is the great disillusionment.

And 150 years later, the Christers, primarily, are fighting a fierce, rear-guard action defending the primacy of their great delusion. They need to believe that the authority of their priests, ministers, preachers, etc. derives directly from some higher power; that some divinity deigned to appear on earth and interfere in human affairs by impregnating a young Hebrew girl; that the presence of this divinity among us was revealed exclusively to a selective few, bestowing upon them some form of spiritual authority over the rest of us; that this authority has been handed down in an unbroken chain of succession ever since; and that the stories surrounding this revelation are set down in holy writ and, if we read them aright (the way the authorities tell us to), it will be revealed to us in all its glory. Magical thinking, that.

Darwin detached that chain at the source, demolished the feigned origins of authority (divine AND secular) and nobility. That is why they hate us.

The Big Picture

Computer simulation showing a view of the multiverse, in which each colored ray is another expanding cosmos

Anselm of Canterbury famously formulated the so-called (by Kant for one) ontological argument for the existence of god roughly as follows: god is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. God's reality is necessary and unconditional by virtue of the fact that we can conceive of it so highly and Platonically perfectly. In reality, the argument reveals less about the divine than it does about the human: as long as we keep conceiving greater and greater conceptions of god, god will keep stepping in to fill the bill. It acknowledges an essential sense of our nature as strivers. Idealists. Perfectionists.

This is consistent with my take on all so-called proofs of god's existence: they tell us more about ourselves than they do about god. As faithful readers of WoW know, I call myself an agnostic. I find both theism and atheism characterized essentially by faith—faith that god exists vs. faith that god doesn't. Fact is, we don't know and we can't prove god's existence. We can keep trying, improving our arguments and proofs, but any god worth its salt would and should keep eluding our best efforts.

An intriguing article in the latest Discover magazine provoked this theological turn: "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory."

The whole intelligent design argument harks back to Medieval ignorance, and beliefs in magic, alchemy, and the miraculous: "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." If I can't explain something by resort to scientific proof or direct observation, it must have been done by god. Complexity and functionality are proof of an intelligent design process; if there's an intelligent design to things, there must be an intelligent designer. QED.

Structurally the intelligent design argument has the same flaws as Anselm's: really it tells us more about ourselves than it does about god. We (humans) so desperately want to believe in something greater than ourselves that we keep coming up with more and more sophisticated arguments to justify that belief.  But these explanations are all grounded in our consciousness of ourselves as individual consciousnesses.  Any idea of salvation implies salvation of the individual, the continuity of the individual consciousness throughout eternity.  What rank hubris!

But why, then, do things make sense? Why are we able to understand the world? the universe? Why can we discern its laws and rules and principles? Why do they seem orderly and intelligently designed? These are the fundamental questions of theology, and, more to the point, of human existence. Religionists of all stripes attempt to reach beyond the observable features of the world for an explanation, but the fact is that we can make sense of this world precisely because we are part and parcel of it. Those laws, etc. govern our very being—body and mind. Consciousness is not something outside the world but a necessary feature of it.

Why then do we feel the need fashion a god as creator of the world, to explain the world by resort to something external to it? Why do we imagine a god outside of it? We do this because we view ourselves, more specifically our minds, as above creation. The Bible intuits this in its very first chapter:

¶ 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

From the beginning, we imagined our consciousness as not subject to universal laws and rules of nature; independent, non-determined, free will. Because we have self-consciousness, we are not of this world, we are superior to it. We have DOMINION.  In this the Bible gets its exactly backwards: we created god in our own image—albeit our best image, in fact 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived'— as a way to conceptualize our sense of self-consciousness, to reify our dominance over the world (and others!)

Now wait a minute. What does this have to do with science and the Discovery article. Just this: the project of a complete science must include the concept of consciousness within its explanation of the physical world. Up until extremely recently, physics, chemistry, etc. have, in Husserl's terms, bracketed being and consciousness. Let's get the facts right first, then come back to those more troubling concepts. The 'Multiverse' article is provocative on this count. Here's some quotes:

“Throughout the history of science, the universe has always gotten bigger,” Carr says. “We’ve gone from geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric. Then in the 1920s there was this huge shift when we realized that our galaxy wasn’t the universe. I just see this as one more step in the progression. Every time this expansion has occurred, the more conservative scientists have said, ‘This isn’t science.’ This is just the same process repeating itself.”

If the multiverse is the final stage of the Copernican revolution, with our universe but a speck in an infinite megacosmos, where does humanity fit in? If the life-friendly fine-tuning of our universe is just a chance occurrence, something that inevitably arises in an endless array of universes, is there any need for a fine-tuner—for a god?

“I don’t think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator,” Weinberg says. “What it does is remove one of the arguments for it, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution made it unnecessary to appeal to a benevolent designer to understand how life developed with such remarkable abilities to survive and breed.”

On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? “If there is only one universe,” Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”

As for Linde, he is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. “Without someone observing the universe,” he says, “the universe is actually dead.”

To borrow a simile from 19th Century British philosopher Shadworth Hodgson, consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, like the foam thrown up on the wave of the ocean of physical reality.
We raise the question, then, is the universe conscious? Is there some (epi-)phenomenon analogous to human consciousness thrown up by the energy of the physical universe? If so, is that god? Certainly that's something greater than which it would be hard to conceive (short, of course, of the phenomenon that threw up that multiverse). Yet, if it were true, how would we know? We can't. And that's the point.

From religion we learn that human beings are selfish, clannish, parochial, prejudicial, racialist, nationalist, sectarian.  They aspire, but are limited by their own natures.  The hubris of the anthropic principle impedes our ability to conceive of anything greater than our own self-consciousness (that than which nothing greater can be conceived).

We end with a cool, Zen-like quote from a speech by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy touching on this theme:

"And it's rather like a puddle waking up one morning--I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer (laughter). A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks "Well, this is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact, it fits me so neatly, I mean, really precise, isn't it? (Laughter) It must have been made to have me in it!" And the sun rises, and he's continuing to narrate the story about this hole being made to have him in it. The sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's still thinking, it's still trapped in this idea, that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us, we will continue to destroy it in the way in which we have been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm."

Easter. Thought.

Today is Easter Sunday in the Western Christian tradition, celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It is a celebration of the physical resurrection from the dead of the crucified Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. It sets into motion a period of celebration, forty days until the Feast of the Ascension and fifty until Pentecost (a/k/a Whitsunday). At the Ascension, Jesus ascended bodily to Heaven. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles.

This entry concerns the Ascension. Christian theology asserts that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven. Now, he is not the only one. According to Catholic theology (from Vatican II in 1950), Mary, Jesus's mother, also ascended bodily into Heaven (a/k/a the Assumption). In the Jewish scriptures (a/k/a the Old Testament), two others purportedly ascended to Heaven: Enoch and Elijah. Enoch apparently just disappeared, whereas Elijah was witnessed ascending in a chariot of fire: "As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind." II KINGS 2:11.

Now, the key word here is 'bodily'. It is essential to Biblical and Christian faith. Sine qua non.

Now the thought: We denizens of the 20th and 21st centuries have learned several important physical laws they weren't aware of when the scriptures were written, one of them being that matter can not travel faster than the speed of light—and certainly not a human body. So, on a generous reading of Holy Scripture and physical law assuming Jesus's and Mary's bodies to be traveling at the speed of light, they are currently some "2,000 light years from home" (apologies to Mick and the boys). Elijah and Enoch are, presumably, somewhat further out.

Thus endeth the lesson.