Roots of Violence--and Peace

We just finished our class on Religion and Violence. It was an excellent class not because of the teachers, but because of all the participants who really engaged in the topic. The last days of this bright class were shaded by the atrocities of the "Islamic State" in Beirut and Paris

Most of the class substantially agreed with Karen Armstrong that religion in itself is not a cause of violence or of the evil of cruelty and humiliation of others, but is often used to rationalize or justify violence and evil behavior. Some recognized that the cause of violence was usually the desire for power through control of others and property by force or by wealth. Still others referred, as did Karen Armstrong, to the reptilian brain that is uncontrolled by the rational brain of the prefrontal cortex.

A recent New Scientist article which I provide here "Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality," cites experiments that turn upside down the notion of the animal primitive flight-or-fight emotional brain overcoming the higher rule-making rational brain.

The experiments indicated that when brains were mapped of people inflicting harm on others, their rule-making brains took precedence over their personal preferences to do no harm. Also noted was that they rapidly became desensitized the more they followed the rule to do harm by an authority figure.

The conclusion is that, if we want to reduce violence and brutality, don't pathologize evil "by supposing that only people with flawed minds are capable of evil, when in fact everyone is, given the right (or wrong) context. If we want to make the world a less violent place, ... we have to consider that context. And that requires us to step back from the individual and look at the group." Another neuroscientist is quoted as saying: "The key question is how the perpetrators of massacres define themselves--the group they identify with and who, as a non-member, they perceive as a threat."

This ties with what we know about group behavior, how homo sapiens evolved to rely on group membership to survive, how belonging to even a small group determines how we see outsiders. We feel less empathy for them and easily write them out of the human species. "What is truly toxic is a construction of in-group and out-group which makes genocide an act of virtue and construes the killers as the most noble among us."

What these finding say to me is that, pace Armstrong, group culture and religion can be a source of evil when it is exclusive and identifies out-groups. In Unitarian-Universalist principles, the first principle is the inherent dignity of every person and UU sermons often use the metaphor of the divine spark in every person (baptized or not, divorced or not, male or female, etc). The Catholic social teaching in which I was raised speaks of every person as a child of God which makes us all siblings.

I don't believe in the "spark of the divine" or the "child of God" literally. But then I do not believe in anything literally if that means outside of metaphor, analogy, and symbolism. Nor do I believe in some dignity belonging to human nature--when there is so much evidence to contradict that. (Just read the books of Cormac McCarthy).

Nevertheless, I choose to act for a Universal Ecclesia, People, Church, Umma, Sangha, Community and for the dignity of all human persons--and all living beings and the earth. And I declare solidarity with all of you who so act no matter what language you use and what cultural tradition you represent.

This is why, even though I do not believe in supernatural entities, I refuse atheism because even that creates an illusion of believers and infidels. I do not consider myself a non-believer and always take communion when I sometimes attend Catholic celebrations with my family and friends even though I detach myself from the institutional, hierarchical, male-dominated Roman Church and many of their teachings of exclusion. The same for my Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and First Nation friends and family.

I affirm my presence in the Universal Church, Umma, Sangha, and People. (As did the Prophets--blessed be their names.) Lots of groups, but no out-groups.

ISIS Attack on DC

The Paris, Beirut, and other attacks by ISIS make me realize that it is quite likely that such an attack will occur here. The leaders of ISIS are choosing soft targets in capitals. And DC, the center of governmental and of corporate power with all its lobbyists determining the policies that will be chosen to stabilize their playgrounds, will probably be targeted.

I often work, worship, and play in DC. I ride the Metro and the busses. I could easily be caught up in such an attack and be killed, as could many of my friends and family.  So just in case that happens, I want to reflect on my death now.

The purpose of terror is to incite fear and reaction. As we organizers learned in our work to support those left behind in organizing themselves: “The action is in the reaction.” First you must polarize in order to get respect to negotiate solutions to common problems. But we taught to do this nonviolently because we were acting to remove coercion from the system and believed like Ghandi, King, Malcolm X, Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi that we need to model what we want to achieve.

Yes, it is the duty of government to protect its citizens from the harm of foreign and domestic enemies, of criminals who want to take our means of livelihood, of epidemics and other illnesses, and of starvation and poverty. It is the duty of government to create the conditions where citizens can thrive in safety. But I believe that those of you who would have government react by stereotyping Muslims, by blocking refugees and immigrants, and by invading countries and leaving behind failed states are also perpetrators of terror.

It is you I blame for my death now. You, like ISIS, are polarizing the world into “my side, your side” simpleminded thinking and creating an atmosphere of hate and fear.

I beg my descendants to think. Please read the history of how the Middle East got to where it is with the cutting up of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Israel, not as a homeland for the Jews, but as an Apartheid State that displaced existing residents.

I do want Israel to survive as a homeland for the displaced Jews of the world. And I would like to see the Middle East develop as a homeland for all peoples: Jews, Christians, Shia, and Sunni, and free from Western control.

But I believe this will only happen when all people feel respected and have the power to shape their environments. To do that we must remove the causes of violence and this will only happen when diverse groups understand each other and their interests and quit the demonizing along with the humiliation and cruelty.

I do not see this coming from ISIS. ISIS has declared war. It is to their advantage that Europe and America see this as war and especially a war of civilizations or religions. But I hope that we can be great-souled enough to change the metaphor. I hope that, while containing ISIS and their violence and brutality, we will work to build the structure for a lasting peace built on justice. I know that will take time--maybe decades. I would be happy to know I was dying for that.  

Statement on Religion and Violence

Cultures are make-believe worlds. Cultures are useful fictions founded on myths that give meaning to human enterprises. The mythic foundation of meaning with its shared stories and rituals is religion. Religion, therefore, is the dimension of all cultures and their imagined orders that gives them meaning. [There is an experiential psychological component of religion, e.g. sense of transcendence, and a bureaucratic institutional component of religion; but I pass on that here.]

Cultures arrived when humans began to use their evolved ability to imagine and fashion symbolic forms to deal with their environments. By sharing these forms through language, art, and science, humans are able to cooperate with one another in tribes, civilizations, and nations in order to meet their needs for biological life (economy) and for associative power (politics). 

Conflict, including force and violence, is the result of one social order in competition with another for livelihood and power. Culture including religion, art, and science rationalizes the force and violence by imaging the other social order as inhuman, and a danger to the human way of life and association.

Religion, therefore, is always connected through culture to both cooperation and conflict. Religion is intricately connected to a tribe’s or a nation’s economic and political order. When times and spaces change, humans change their imagined order. But the only way out of one imagined order is by building another.

My personal hope is that we humans in our coming postmodern world can together create an imaginative global order, respecting the diverse cultures of our premodern and modern worlds, while building in the possibility of continued self-critique, revision, and transcendence. I think this can only happen by contact between persons, communities, and cultures where and when we can participate the others' stories and feel their sufferings.

The postmodern myth

Since we think by painting images, which appear on the framed canvas of our mind, the only way to cross the boundaries of no longer relevant images is through new, refined, or expanded images on an expanded canvas. Our imaginative order is transcended only within a new imaginative order. In other words, the only way to think outside the box is by building a new and bigger box (that we soon will need to think out of). The myths of the premodern human mind, including the external forces of spirits and gods, have been replaced by higher-level, comprehensive myths of modernity, which include essences, natures, laws, and reason.

What then is the myth that is developing for the postmodern age beyond theology and metaphysics? The new myth is in process of being told in novels, films, music, and dance. It is being formulated in our scientific theories of the birth and development of the universe, the evolution of life, and the sharing of information. It is being constructed by elements within our religious and philosophical traditions of golden rules, universal human dignity, and mindfulness. Most importantly, the elements of the new myth are being collated through the contact of persons, groups, communities, and cultures sharing their stories.

We can preview or at least guess some of the themes of this new developing myth that will hopefully provide us the values, norms, and standards through which the human species might advance. They include:

• Empathic, universal consciousness
• Criticism without end
• Respect for diverse traditions and expressions
• Inclusive, unifying stories
• Transcending boundaries by setting new ones
• Wholistic and organic development
• Transparency and self-critique
• Problem solving in broader contexts
• Provisional and falsifiable conclusions
• Holding tension among polarities and uncertainties
• Adventure in the common quest for life, meaning, and solidarity
• Collective decision-making on the values and norms we agree to live by
• Freedom and justice for all--in deed, not just rhetoric

Whether this myth is expressed by artists, scientists, historians, philosophers, parents, or teachers, it weaves together what is important to diverse cultures and at the same time is open to continual questioning and change. The developing myth will assume the religious, economic, and political myths by which most of us live today and which change us in the process.

There are three pitfalls for the postmodern myth to avoid:

1. Nihilism. By acknowledging that our belief-systems are fictions, we are in peril of becoming relativists without firm values and norms. We then believe nothing and are committed to nothing. Nihilism and hopelessness ensue. This will lead to non-engagement with our fellow citizens of the world, to passivity and depression. Or it will lead to the "all is permitted" reaction of another true belief like Nazism or Stalinism and other types of fascism that uses force and cruelty to bring some measure of stability and meaning in an uncertain world. It could also lead to a transhuman future (Orwell's 1984, Fahrenheit 451, the Matrix) that we have not thought though and that destroys the values we want to hold dear.

2. Elitism. We elevate our postmodern (secular, humanist, liberal) myth to a new dogma in which we divide ourselves as the enlightened intelligencia from those who cannot "get it." Our speech and behavior to show how intellectually honest, courageous, and smart we are incites reaction by those who are comfortable in their accustomed ways of speaking, with the beliefs and rituals that help them cope, and with the propositions by which they make community. That reaction and counter-reaction can take brutal form.

3. Inevitability. Qué sera, sera. Progress is inevitable for those on the "side of history." This accompanies shallow thinking that might criticize belief systems, but avoids consideration of the social structures which reinforce those belief systems. It leads to irresponsibility where we attempt to change hearts and even minds without the messy engagement of social change.

If we are truly postmodern, we can accommodate diversity, openness to expression, and above all empathy with all cultures as we intend and act for a more global culture and open society in which we too will learn and be changed.

Cynics and Skeptics

Diogenes, ancestor and spokesperson for Cynicism, was sitting on his pillar when Alexander the Great, Prince of Macedonia and Conquerer of the World, came up to him. Alex, tutored by Aristotle to be a seeker of wisdom, asked Diogenes if there was anything in the whole world he could do for him. Diogenes answered: "yes, could you move over a little bit? You are blocking my sunlight."

The Middle East followers of Diogenes, uninterested in material gain, withdrew from the political economic order of patronage that caused such suffering among the peasantry. These cynics would walk around with just a pack on their back having no secure place to make their beds and lay down. They would teach others who were suffering to join in their way of life. Tune in and Drop out! 

John Dominic Crossan, in his anthropological and archeological studies of the time of Jesus of Nazareth, reached the conclusion that Jesus was influenced by, and perhaps took on the way of, these ancient hippies. Cynics refused to believe in the patronage myth that held that society together. Of course the whole political economic order depended on the peasant class, so cynicism could be quite threatening to the ruling class who named these people dogs (Gr. kynos).  

According to Harari, "This is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population – and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces – truly believe in it. Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism."

Today a cynic is considered someone who does not believe in anything. But the original cynics merely quit believing in the current imagined order and began acting on different beliefs which made them rebels. And they were not necessarily skeptics.

Skepticism taught that truth could never be obtained. The Sophist Pyrroh, the Muslim philosopher Al Ghazali, and English empiricist David Hume taught that nothing could be held with certainty. Big theory philosophers determined that such a teaching was illogical. For if you taught skepticism then you thought it to be true--a contradiction. And even if you admitted the limitation of the human mind in obtaining truth, it clearly reached truths through clear and distinct ideas. And God through His illumination will do the rest. 

Skepticism was redeemed by science which adopted methodic doubt. Everything, even every answer that science affirmed as true, is to be questioned. Its answers are always provisional and partial. But still truth could be achieved and someday science will achieve the unifying insight into everything and that will be the Truth--or as Hawking metaphorically called it "the Mind of God."

A postmodern is a cynic in the original sense and a complete skeptic that holds that there are no final truths. This is quite different from premodern or modern believers. Premodern thinkers generally believed that things could be known with certainty if revealed as such by the gods or inspired by God. Modern thinkers generally believed that things could be known with certainty through logic or using scientific method. 

But postmodern thinkers, accepting the symbolic mode of interacting with others in the environment, believe that they cannot know with certainty, that all expressions are questionable, and that we all live, as the song says, in a make-believe world.

While that is distressing to some, it is also liberating to many and certainly to me.  As a postmodern, I do not complain of being imprisoned by myth. I help create a new self-conscious myth with the values, norms, and standards to lead us on. But that shall be my next blog.

The Postmodern Mind and Progress

A colleague chided me the other day for citing progress in racial and class relations. How can you claim progress if you are a postmodern?

That stopped me. To say things are better (or worse) is to imply a norm or standard. But postmoderns, accepting biological evolution and the constructive characteristic of thinking, have dispensed with absolutes of all kinds. We have "historically criticized" the religious theologies of gods, angels, heavenly revelations, and bodiless souls. We have also "scientifically criticized" teleological and metaphysical theologies that identify God with Reason, Divine Spark, Ground of Being, Higher Power, Alpha/Omega Point, Universal Consciousness, or Cosmic Process. (This is not to say these ideas do not have metaphorical and poetic value.)

In short, we have, as Harari says in Sapiens (please read my previous blog), acknowledged the symbolic form of our world created through our art, science, history, and religion, all contexted and supported by an evolving myth or imaginative order adopted intersubjectively. In culture we have unified our stories, shared our beliefs, and built a fiction through which we can cooperate to adapt to and with our environment. So far we see diverse cultures operating in tribes, civilizations, and nations. Whether we can build a universal, yet developing culture or, more importantly, whether we want to still remains to be seen.

Would we be better off, happier, more fulfilled, more actualized, more human? Again that depends on our standards and norms. But these are not to be found in premodern theology or modern metaphysics, though they might be precursored in our art, stimulated in our religious traditions, accounted for in our history, and criticized through our science. The values and norms we live by and the myths we choose to support them are not "out there" in divine or natural laws or "in here" in immutable essences or natures, nor even in evolved structures of our existence and thinking (as I once held).

Because we have no absolutes in heaven or on earth, postmodernists are condemned as relativists without firm anchors and therefore responsible for the sorry state the world is in. If there are no firm values and norms that can be found in divine revelation or scientific reason, then we humans do not have the grounds on which to stand together. Skepticism and cynicism, conservative religionists and liberal humanists alike argue, are contradictory, self-defeating, and destructive of human nature and threatening to human existence.

Of course we counter that it is the illusion of absolutes whether expressed in theological or metaphysical terms through art, science, and religion that is creating the conflicts that result in cruelty and genocide. While we might cop to being skeptics and cynics (I'll deal with this later), we deny that we are relativists without values and norms. Instead of proclaiming that there are absolutes in heaven or in the mind or that all is relative and so everything is permitted, we proclaim all is relational, or at least we are. And it is through relationships, person to person, story to story, culture to culture that we may come to objective norms and values by which we choose to live and act with one another.

Next: a new self-critical, transcending, universal myth?
Next: the cynic and the skeptic?

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, 2015) does what I am trying to do in these essays but in a different form. He uses a linear form which makes for a very readable story; whereas I use a more circular collection of thoughts. He is showing an arrow of time. I am trying to circle in on an insight. But we are both leading to the same point where we must, as a species reaching beyond our modern mind, make a decision about who we want to become or as he says "what we want to want."

Harari presents the history of humankind using the latest in scholarship, and especially evolutionary anthropology. He organizes his history by four revolutions: Cognitive, Agricultural, Industrial, and Scientific. The Cognitive Revolution is the unintended result of the natural selection of genes that permit homo sapiens to imagine, that is, to symbolically order the world, and thus create culture. The other three revolutions are the results of the interplay of the myths that were made and used by tribes and civilizations to support cooperation and conflict within and among them. "Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths."

In his story Harari is showing us some choices for the next revolution which is already thrusting beyond the modern era. Shall we call it the Second Cognitive, the Interstellar, the Empathic, the Intersubjective, or the Unified Consciousness Revolution?

In presenting his story he is attending to the myths that now run our social, economic, and political orders; and he is fashioning a new myth. Our imagined order, whose religion is "liberalism," with its themes of individual, free market, progress, community, humanism, democracy, nation state, articulated in our myths and religions, is a fiction. But it is a fiction we need so we can adopt the values and norms to organize ourselves for survival and reproduction. 

Our fictions have changed and will continue to change with our direct contact with an environment that we are affecting by patterns of behavior supported by those fictions. We are in constant design for a new myth to solve the contradictions of the previous one. "There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison."

Harari identifies three "realities": subjective, objective, and intersubjective. A phenomenon is subjective if it is only the perception of an individual, like a revelation or hallucination. Something is objective if it does not rely on the experience or categorization of humans, like radioactivity, sound waves, light particles. Something is intersubjective if its perception is shared by many. But here I quibble a bit with Harari. There is no purely subjective; for even personal experiences are shaped by social milieu. There is no purely objective; for while radioactivity, sound waves, and light particles are judged to be come from an environment distinct from the human organism, they are experienced and understood only within the affirmation of human thinking. In other words, even the subjective and the objective appear only in a social milieu. Both subjectivity and objectivity are intersubjective.

But in saying this I am merely supporting his thesis of the cognitive revolution that creates the context for the other three and the ones to come. Thinking is intersubjective. The human engagement of a world through symbolic forms is an intersubjective activity. Thus the fictions or myths of culture are a condition for the continued existence, and progress, of homo sapiens.

"After the agricultural revolution, human societies grew ever larger and more complex, while the imagined constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture.’" Religion, the arts, the sciences are cultural fabrications relying on myths.

And yet here is where postmodern humans have reached a point of both peril and possibility. Because we now know that our economy and polity is founded on the myths of culture, do we no longer have beliefs able to sustain us?  "A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them."

At the end of this wonderful book, Harari asks the question for which it seems neither evolution nor history have an answer.  "Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology. But are we happier?" 

Progress? better? happier? Do these mean anything in an age without divine or natural laws, without an afterlife to reward or punish, without true essences and clear and distinct ideas? We continue this question in our next essay.