Prometheus Unbound

Today I responded to biologist Jerry Coyne’s question, which he asked at his blog, about whether atheists should take theologians (or theological discussion) seriously.

Here’s what I wrote:

Professor Coyne:

I’m an agnostic who (from my previous posts here) obviously has some intellectual respect for the religious philosophical tradition, and so it’s not a hard question that you’ve asked.

I think that you should take seriously those theological discussions and theological thinkers that secular academic intellectuals and philosophers continue to take seriously. You should take seriously, for example, these five: Gabriel Marcel, Spinoza, Thomas A., Alvin Plantinga, and Reinhold Niebuhr. This is not because you might arrive at their identical conclusions about things, but because they might offer interesting and novel ways of thinking about issues of interest to atheists.

I’d like to challenge you, Professor Coyne, to read just one short theological/philosophical essay by Reinhold Niebuhr and then to comment on it here at your blog. It is the lead essay in an anthology of his writings that you can get at Amazon. The book is titled “The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr.” The essay is titled, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith.” Whether you agree or disagree with Niebuhr’s conclusions in that essay, I’d nevertheless be curious to discover whether you find the way that he talks about the transcendent and atheism in that essay valuable or interesting.

Will you get the book, read that essay, and comment at your blog on it? I promise that I’m not leading you into a thicket of difficulty, or anything time consuming. The essay is only about 13 pages.

Here’s a link to the book at Amazon:

 http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Reinhold-Niebuhr-Selected-Addresses/dp/0300040016/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246292652&sr=8-2

—Santi

It will be interesting to see if he responds, and reads the Niebuhr essay and comments on it. If you’ve never read it, by the way, it’s pretty good. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Human vitality has two primary sources, animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence. The more human consciousness arises to full self-consciousness and to a complete recognition of the total forces of the universe in which it finds itself, the more it requires not only animal vitality but confidence in the meaningfulness of its world to maintain a healthy will-to-live. This confidence in the meaningfulness of life is not something which results from a sophisticated analysis of the forces and factors which surround the human enterprise. It is something which is assumed in every healthy life. It is primary religion. Men may be quite unable to define the meaning of life, and yet live by a simple trust that it has meaning. This primary religion is the basic optimism of all vital and wholesome human life.

Friedrich Nietzsche (from The Twilight of the Idols ):

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

The short answer is no, it’s not mean or irrational.

Under normal circumstances nobody gets to do what Michael Jackson did (bring unrelated children into his bedroom overnight). No adult man gets to do that without suspicion cast upon him by other adults. It’s simply not sane to give adult males that kind of latitude with the most vulnerable among us. And for Jackson to engage in that behavior—bringing children into his bedroom overnight—and then act put-upon by the public for being suspicious that he was a pedophile is outrageous.

An analogy: Every weekend a suburban woman goes to a street corner known to be frequented by prostitutes. She gets picked up by cruising men who drive her to nearby motels. Before they return her to the same street corner, they give her money. She tells people that she never has sex with the men. Never touches them. Never blows them. Never lets them put their hands on her. She just talks to them. They simply drive around. She feels compassion for the men. They’re lonely. She tells them about Jesus. She wants to help them. She doesn’t understand why all those around her suspect she’s a whore.

Jackson engaged in equally outrageous (and suspicion generating) actions—many of them characteristic of pedophiles—and then he is shocked—shocked!—that people might suspect that he is, well, a pedophile. And the power disparity between Jackson and the children who visited his bedroom for “sleep-overs” is enormous. A wealthy man in his forties was bringing children unrelated to him into his bedroom alone overnight. A person needs to absorb the import of that before suggesting that the suspicion directed toward Jackson is unreasonable and based on animus.

Furthermore, to treat pedophile-suspicion directed toward Michael Jackson as a form of persecution is to tell people it is wrong to speak plainly about what is evident. Jackson lived his life in ways characteristic of a pedophile. It doesn’t mean that he was one. It means that there is a real probability that he was one. No adult male gets to bring unrelated children into his bedroom alone overnight without suspicion being rendered by other adults. It would be a monstrous dereliction of duty toward the children involved not to cast that suspicion. And it would be Orwellian not to speak to others plainly about it.

I understand “innocent until proven guilty.” But I sure the hell wouldn’t have had him anywhere near my children. And the children that he did bring around him were oftentimes hugely vulnerable (cancer patients; boys of poor single mothers). An adult single male obsessed with Peter Pan and decorating his bedroom with children’s toys was bringing kids into his bedroom for “sleep-overs.” That should set off five alarm predator worries in any sane parent who is not stupid or tempted by greed. And Jackson showed zero evidence of having any serious impulse control. The older I get, the less patience I have for bullshitters. Michael Jackson was, in my view, a huge bullshitter who got away with spectacular amounts of bullshit. It’s like Rush Limbaugh, G. Beck, and Jimmy Swaggart. Everyday, bullshitters look at their bank accounts and say, “How stupid people are!” This, in my view, was what Jackson was doing. He was using his fame and wealth and “mystery power” to get away with things. It’s an old game. If you dress like a glitzy version of Captain Crunch (as Chris Rock noted that Jackson did), or put on the clothing of a priest, or have money, then you can cast spells on people and get away with stuff.

Jackson was a spell-caster.

Below is a video of reporter Martin Bashir speaking of Jackson. Bashir illustrates the problem. Note Bashir’s rhetorical tone-down of what it means to be a single man bringing young boys into his bedroom for “sleep-overs,” and his logically fallacious “I never saw anything” obscurantism. His emotional solemnity is also cloying. It’s all slight of hand and euphemism. Of course he wouldn’t have seen anything. It means nothing. I have a great deal of contempt for people who use language in ways that distort, rather than clarify, an issue. It’s like using “enhanced interrogation” for “torture.” Michael Jackson was suspected of being a pedophile because he brought vulnerable children into his orbit and took them into his bedroom overnight alone. At least Bashir, as a journalist, could describe things accurately. But, of course, he doesn’t. But the rest of us should.

I can see why the embedding of this video was disabled. Its complicity is shameful. But you can still get to it directly here.

An interesting article about the toaster and its meaning for art, philosophy, invisible-hand capitalism, and the universe here.

If you’ve ever wondered how Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have attained such large followings via their daily dishing out of “thought terminating cliches“ and oversimplifications, here’s part of the answer:

Louis Prima:

Philosopher John Gray sees it only in Michel Onfray:

Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism [titled in its U.S. edition as "Atheist Manifesto"] is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: “Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.”

I share Gray’s curiosity about the absence of Nietzsche among prominent atheists writing in English. Perhaps it has to do with the “Little Miss Sunshine” competition with religion? Selling reflections on complexity, nihilism, and pessimism to the ADG (“attention deficit generation”) is to lose them to the religious sales departments before you even start. And nuance is always a naughty word. In the 21st century, whatever it is that you’re selling, you must never forget to repeat yourself slowly and smile.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? (John 3:4 KJV)

I love this portrait of Thomas Jefferson. In good Neoclassical and Apollonian fashion, Jefferson at once resists our objectification of him by returning our gaze and asserting his mastery over life by a stylized second birth. This second birth is on his terms, his head lifted over the maternal fur, this time without all the Dionysian wailing and blood. Here is a man of the Enlightenment asserting his serene control of nature—and of his viewers.

Still, his not-entirely controlled hair hints that wildness, even in an Enlightenment philosophe, cannot be completely banished; that even Thomas Jefferson cannot, in any ultimate sense, prevent the return of the repressed. (So all you Apollo worshipers out there, love your Dionysian mother too.)

It turns out that goose bumps are an evolutionary holdover from when we had fur. Here’s Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree, goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.

My wife says Steven Pinker has a lewd name.

Oh, and Thomas Jefferson had a fur coat (to replace the one that he lost from evolution):

This month’s Wired is reporting on a shocking scientific finding:

A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life. Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they gather in shape-shifting strands that morph into stable configurations.

The article quotes one scientist on the implications of the discovery, not just for life’s evolutionary origins, but for creating completely different life forms in the laboratory:

According to University of Manchester organic chemist John Sutherland, who co-authored the Nature study showing how RNA’s ingredients could have formed, the new research is less important in providing primordial insight than in furthering the eventual creation of life in a laboratory.

“Ghadiri’s important and highly innovative new work potentially relates to the origin of life as we don’t yet know it,” said Sutherland. Life’s emergence took billions of years, a process now being compressed into the passage of a few human generations. “The possibility that humans could come up with an alternative biology that outdoes that which produced us is a mind-freeing and mind-bending concept,” he said.

Thought terminating cliches?

You know, like the ones that Americans hear weekly from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

Here’s the psychologist Robert Lifton, from his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism :

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

Here are two examples of thought terminating cliches:

• Global warming is just a way for liberals to get us all driving small cars.
• Swine flu is being hyped by liberals to promote international cooperation and so chip away at the sovereignty of the United States.

Thought terminating cliches are especially suitable for compressed communication mediums like Twitter.

At Salon.com today, physicist Joseph Romm suggests how to frame the debate on “cap and trade”—and win it—as the bill passed in the House now heads for a vote in the Senate:

The key to framing a win on this bill is to portray it — accurately — as the single most important vote a member will ever cast. If we fail to stop catastrophic global warming, future generations will not care what we have done on issues like health care, the deficit and Iraq. If we fail to stop massive sea level rise, widespread desertification, and 10-degrees-Fahrenheit warming over much of the inland U.S. — all of which we face on our current emissions path — then every person who voted against this bill will be vilified by history.

Michael Jackson was a man of contradictions:

Someone recently said to me that to conclude that the universe is without purpose needn’t lead to pessimism and Albert Camus-like rebellion (as I have been suggesting lately). Nihilism might just as well mean “the loss of misery and despair as well. One cannot mind that nothing matters.”

There’s certainly some truth in this.

But I think that the problem of human consciousness is that it prefers some states over others in an otherwise indifferent environment. In other words, consciousness has preferences; the universe does not. And it is outrage at this absurdity (that one is born into a world with desires that cannot be reliably satisfied) that consciousness rebels against. To resign oneself to the state of nature—”one to me is loss and gain; one to me is shame and fame; one to me is pleasure and pain”—is to, in my view, make Heidegger’s move (to embrace “Being”). But I’m still with Sartre and Camus here. I think we would lose our human consciousness and identity if we did not rebel against the preference-free, unconconscious universe. I’m okay with being a Buddha occasionally, and sitting and letting the world come and go with equanimity. But unlike Paul McCartney, ultimately I don’t want to just ”let it be.” I will rebel.

Maybe rebellion is just a heightened form of suffering. Sisyphus pushing his rock. But what else are we going to do? Buddha sitting is certainly an alternative. But Buddha sitting is a kind of death before dying; an embrace of nothingness before you are nothing.

So Buddha sitting isn’t really a great solution either, is it?

This is why Camus said that the first question of philosophy is suicide. Once you’ve absorbed the universe’s apparent indifference and purposelessness, your next move is some form of death or rebellion.

This:

Or this:

For me, I’m not ready to die yet.

But maybe it’s foolishness on my part.

No, he will not yield the mic, nor will he sit down, until he has spoken his peace:

President Obama, in pushing his own agenda, could learn a thing or two from this defiant and courageous Iranian.

Know hope.

Here and there.

Passage O soul to India!

Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!

Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?

Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere

     brutes?

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

 

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

 

O my brave soul!

O farther farther sail!

O darting joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

O farther, farther, farther sail!

Source: Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India”

My wife’s friend (and our colleague at the college that we all teach at in California) hit the big time last month, seeing her University of Nebraska Press book, How to Cook a Tapir, reviewed in both the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Given the steady reduction in size of the Sunday book sections of the major newspapers, getting so much as even a mention there is quite an achievement.

The Los Angeles Times review of Joan Fry’s book is here.

And her book at Amazon.com is here.

Am I missing something here? 

The television media, for the past two days, have been wall-to-wall with Michael Jackson’s death, but it seems that any discussion of his apparently life-long pedophilia compulsions are off-limits. They’re hinted at, they’re alluded to, but nobody says shit out-loud about it. It just doesn’t seem quite polite on TV to talk ill of the recently deceased.

I suppose it’s remotely possible that Jackson was not a pedophile, but if he wasn’t then he appears to have missed it by only a hair. It’s true that he managed to gain an acquittal when he was tried for some specific counts of pedophilia, but let’s get real here. He paid one family $20 million dollars to avoid legal action against him, and his lifelong behavior bore all the signs of a manipulative and wealthy pedophile using his money to obtain access to children.  

I like what Lisa Marie Presley said back in the summer of 2008 about her marriage to Michael Jackson. Presley had just turned forty, and at forty, things look different. She was asked about her marriage to Jackson and she said:

That was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I was really naive at the time. I was in la-la land. I must have been out of my fucking mind.

Source: The Week, Sept. 5, 2008.

That’s what the television media are right now. Out of their fucking minds. Watching the different networks is like sitting around in the living room with a bunch of relatives in denial. They all seem to be in agreement that now is not the time to speak the truth about the dead. But it’s sending a terrible signal about the value our culture places on children. Michael Jackson was, well, famous, so let’s all look the other way, at least for a few days.

Not me.

Remember the Ed Bradley interview?

For more of my take on Michael Jackson, see here.

Pinch me.

We are living in the 21st century, right?

For most of my adult life, I’ve had a pretty handy way, when I’m asleep—and my dream is getting a bit too scary or unpleasant—of figuring out whether or not I’m probably just dreaming: I try to notice anything going on that is strange, highly improbable, or impossible.

I might, for example, notice that:

• I’ve fallen off a cliff and have only scratches
• I can fly
• I continue to be conscious even after undergoing something that should have killed me
• Someone who has already died is hanging out with me

In other words, something odd or highly unlikely—or either physically or logically impossible—is happening—and that cues me that I’m probably dreaming. Perhaps you’ve noticed similar cues in your own dreams that have suggested to you, while sleeping, that yes, in fact, you are likely to be dreaming.

But wait.

It’s dawned on me recently that my criteria for deciding whether I’m dreaming are only superficially reliable. Indeed, to put it bluntly, they’re deeply flawed. The reason I say this is that, by my very same criteria, what I take to be reality may also be a dream. Here’s some examples:

• Yesterday, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day. I realize I’m starting off with a lame example, but it’s something most people wouldn’t expect, and it happened, didn’t it?
• A few months back, a commercial airliner crashed into the Hudson River and nobody died. Once again, this is highly improbable, although I also admit that it is not logically impossible. But still, it’s something that, if I were sleeping, and trying to break the spell of a dream, might arouse my suspicions that yes, in fact, I’m dreaming.

Now you might say that both of these examples are spectacularly poor ones and easily explained. Such things, in a dream, might be no more than the beginning hints of something that is not quite right. But let’s take another example that brings us just a bit further along into doubt about whether you and I are dreaming right now:

• I take it as impossible (as I’m sure that you do) that a human standing on a sidewalk should simply begin to float in the air. But I also notice when I step outside that the sun, the moon, and the stars are in the sky, and that they’re not falling. When you think about it, that’s pretty trippy too. Thomas Jefferson famously said, on first hearing of people claiming to have seen rocks that had fallen out of the sky, that they must be lying, for rocks do not fall to earth from the sky. But meteors do fall to earth, don’t they? How odd to be in a system where some rocks fly and others fall. 

Now I know what you’re thinking. Any physicist could explain this seeming contradiction in a snap via the basic principles of gravity and the laws of motion. But here’s what’s interesting: Our dreams are predominantly lawful also. We touch things and they mostly move in predictable ways. Only some of the things in dreams seem out of the ordinary. In other words, most things that happen in dreams are physically impossible only in terms of what we deem to be “normal” in our waking states. But many of the things that are normal in our waking states, when you think about it, are as trippy and utterly contingent as our dreams. The universe didn’t have to have floating suns and moons and some rocks that fall from the sky. But it does. It is true that we have explanations for them, but these explanations are, ultimately, forms of rabbit-chasing question begging. In other words, the “explanation” may be in the dream too. The trippy question is why  things should be the way that they are at all, or move in accord with laws, or why there should be any laws in the first place. Laws don’t have to be. And floating suns, moons, and stars don’t have to be. But they are. In short, the universe that you imagine yourself to be awake in is as strange as anything in your dreams. You just think of your dreams as stranger than your waking states because they don’t match your waking states. But your waking states are simply a strangeness of a different kind, not of a different order.   

Here’s another example: Dinosaurs. Two hundred years ago people started digging in the earth and finding dinosaurs. Prior to that moment, nobody dreamed that there were such creatures buried in the ground. It’s like in a dream, where you’re suddenly being chased by a monster, or you suddenly find yourself floating. Who would have thought it? But what are your criteria for taking the latter as signifying a dream and the former as signifying reality? Aren’t these kinds of trippy and unexpected “real” discoveries a characteristic of dreams? The same applies to the first time it dawned on people that the earth is not only not flat, but it’s a spinning teensy ball zipping through space at the edge of a galaxy that is just one of a gazillion other galaxies in a universe that may itself be part of a gigantic multiverse.

Surely if you had dreamed such a thing six hundred years ago you’d wake up and say, “That was absurd! I knew I was dreaming!”

But you’re not dreaming, are you?

Are you?

Here’s my ringer (that we might, in fact, all be dreaming something together). It’s one thing to be suspicious about improbable and seemingly physically impossible things, but when something happens that we know  is logically impossible, then surely we must be dreaming, right?

Exhibit A: The universe’s existence. There are only three things that might explain the universe’s existence:

1. God made it;
2. it made itself; or
3. it has always been

That’s it. All three ”answers” are, at some level, either a form of question begging, or logically impossible. If, for example, God made the universe, who made God? The creator leads to an endless regression. And let’s look at the second “explanation” for the universe. If the universe made itself, then that means that there once was nothing and now there is something. That’s ridiculous. As King Lear says, “Nothing can come of nothing.” This leaves us with only one more option: The universe has always been. But that explanation for the universe sucks too. If the universe has just always been, how could that be? It’s crazy. As the poet A.R. Ammons has said: “The universe has no floor / but we walk the floor.”

That sounds like a dream to me.

So what if we are living in a dream? What does this mean? Well, one thing it means is that the boundary that you have set between you and everything else is flawed, for you are, in fact, the whole shebang. The universe is all in your head! All the cool and unexpected things that you hear or encounter are coming from you. You’re surprising yourself.

You do that in dreams too, don’t you? People say things or things happen that completely blow you away. You think that you couldn’t possibly have thought of that yourself, but you did, because it happened in your head.

You’re very smart, indeed!

But now my question is: Are you dreaming me, am I dreaming you, or is somebody else dreaming both of us?

And how would we know?

Here’s part of a scene I like in the film Magnolia. The sky starts to rain frogs. The part of this scene where a smart little boy watches the frogs fall and says to himself repeatedly—”This is something that happens!”—is not included here, but I hope you get the point. Weird things—like dinosaurs and physicists who claim we might live in a hologram—crop up periodically in our consciousnesses—and we incorporate them into what we call reality. In other words, we seem vested in a thesis that we live in a ”real world” when we might just as well be living in a kind of dream (the hint of which being all the weird shit that’s happening, and that we discover has happened, and that we nevertheless get used to somehow and then take for “normal”):