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As I wrote in The Dance of Consciousness, there is an eclectic coherence to the thoughts expressed on this blog, as there is to all thought that penetrates beneath a certain level of superficiality, and much that doesn’t. And as I explained in The Algorithms of Complexity, that coherence is a product of what might be described as “a tree of natural algorithms,” with larger branches controlling smaller ones, and our shared intellectual (and thus political) quest being getting closer and closer to the sublime and perhaps ultimately unattainable “trunk” controlling them all.
I described this in terms of a synthesis of several ideas about ideas, including paradigm shifts, dialectics, and meme theory. We live in a world forged by a competition of ideas, some sets of which may come to predominate in certain times and places (in the form of dominant paradigms), but which themselves are constantly challenged by both internal anomalies and conflicting interests or perspectives, combining an on-going problem-solving process with an on-going competition of both ideas and material interests.
To be clear, the competition of ideas has a large material component, such as the competition between military and economic technologies (which are implemented sets of ideas), a competition decided by which win in a physical competition over either the relative ability to physically coerce, or the relative ability to win market share.
In many ways, what happens in academe is more deeply political than what happens in politics narrowly defined, because it involves explorations into deeper currents that eventually inform the shallower ones. The processes are intertwined, so that as political permutations of academic ideas are discredited, so are the academic ideas, whereas political forms that succeed become academically rationalized.
So, the Enlightenment ideas of Locke and Montesquieu were derived from a combination of classical political philosophy and the recent historical experience of Western European, and particularly English development (most particularly in the form of The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was arguably more the moment when sovereignty shifted from crown to people than was The American Revolution), and in turn informed the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution, which have been vindicated by historical success, securing the success of their foundational ideas along with them. Conversely, the equally intellectual ideas of Marx and Engels, as well as a variety of fellow-traveling anarchists and socialists, informed horribly failed political experiements, discrediting the whole complex of imperfectly implemented ideas along with the discredited attempts to implement them.
This sometimes involves “babies” being thrown out with “bathwater,” or “bathwater” being retained along with the “babies” that were in it, such as the popular Western dismissal of every idea Karl Marx ever had due to the abject failure of most societies that tried to implement his general doctrine, or the popular acceptance of an idealized laissez-faire economic philosophy because the more nuanced reality more or less incorporating it has proven to be generally successful along certain highly valued dimensions.
Not only are our ideas and political forms a product of various dialectic and paradigmatic dynamics (including the dialectic of conceptualization and implementation), but also of how these are compiled into ideological packages. The translation of ideas and political forms into political ideologies is very consequential, because even slight errors can be amplified into tragic proportions. For instance, Social Darwinism, despite how horrific it was, was essentially just the confounding of a descriptive reality with a normative one, justifying and even idolizing successful brutality because successful brutality tended, historically, to prevail.
The challenge we are faced with, as conscious beings, is how best to participate in these processes. There are many facets to this challenge, including identifying the purpose(s) of our participation, and the degree to which we feel any imperative to impose our will on the organic development of human history. Some might argue that there is no real purpose to our participation, that we should each simply pursue our own lives, addressing our own interests and the interests of those we care about, and let the rest take care of itself. This is the value-system of “mutual indifference,” caring about ourselves and those closest to us, but not caring about others only to the extent that doing so serves our primary concern.
But this is akin to “non-cooperation” in collective action problems (see Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems), condemning everyone, now and in the future, to fare less well than we otherwise might have. It is the embrace of a mere hyped-up animal existence, grasping in the moment, without far-reaching imagination or foresight or compassion in any way informing our choices. The result is a combination of organized violence and relentless exploitation of any human or natural resource that any group is able to exploit, to our own ultimate self-destruction.
Both humanity and Gaia are better served by more conscious participation in our shared existence, by the proactive effort to understand the systems of which we are a part and which comprise us in order to most fully realize the genius of the many, in service both to our collective material welfare, now and in the future, and to our cognitive capacity to most fully enjoy it. I call the ideology which best meets this challenge “cynical idealism,” the pursuit of the ideal in the cold light of an unflinching understanding of less-than-ideal existing realities.
What we see more frequently is the exact opposite: “Idealistic cynicism,” which is the idealization of who and what we are, while essentially surrendering to the cold, cruel realities of the world. One prominent examples of this is the “angry progressive” movement, driven by the belief that conservatives are the enemy, and committed to achieving immediate progressive policy ends while surrendering to politics as usual in order to do so. It is idealistic about existing realities, by frequently ignoring the real political dynamics by which those ends must be achieved, inconveniences such as compromising with competing points of view and interests, while remaining cynical about our ability to ever transcend our current state of being in any fundamental way (despite the historical reality of constantly transcending previous states of being in very dramatic ways, through a combination of technological and political economic revolutions, for instance).
Another example of “idealistic cynicism” is Tea Party conservatism, which is superficially the opposite of angry progressivism, but on a more fundamental level representative of essentially the same political modality. Tea Partiers are driven by an ideal that they believe to be immediately dispositive, the ideal of absolute freedom from state (i.e., mutual) coercion, which is mobilized in service to an implicitly cynical reality, that we are just a collection of ultimately disconnected individuals whose highest responsibility to one another is to stay out of each other’s way.
Both of these archetypal examples of idealistic cynicism are dogmatic, convinced of substantive truths without worrying too much about how those substantive certainties were arrived at. Cynical idealism, conversely, is the exact opposite: It focuses on procedures by which to improve both our understandings and our implementations of those understandings in service to our collective well-being, here and elsewhere, now and in the future. A cynical idealist recognizes our foibles, including the foibles of oneself, and so is more committed to careful examination of the strengths and weaknesses of various conceptualizations and proposals than to precipitous advocacy of the ones they find most emotionally appealing (the latter leading to our noisy and dumb politics of today, a competition of ideas less refined than otherwise might have been attainable in an alternative political culture).
Therefore, the first pillar of transcendental politics is a dominant commitment to procedures and methodologies, and a more humble and flexible commitment to the inevitably tentative substantive positions that are produced by those procedures and methodologies (see Ideology v. Methodology). This has already occurred to a large extent in one of the most important of our deep political institutions: Academe. Academe is political because it is a place where we produce authoritative (though often competing) statements about reality. And it is not, as has been the historical norm, a mere branch of politics narrowly defined, authoritative truth being a product of who can force it upon others, but is rather, to a large (if inevitably incomplete) extent, a product of a very sophisticated process, of a particular algorithm of for discovering certain facets of reality, carved on the lathe of history, and by the efforts of human beings engaging in it and advocating for it.
It has also occurred, to a lesser but growing extent, in law, where resolutions of legal disputes (including disputes over the meaning of the law itself) are resolved through a very highly refined academic process. This is not to say that politics narrowly defined do not in some ways and at some times control decisions in both of these spheres: Supreme Court justices and federal judges are appointed for political reasons, with attention to their political predispositions; scholarship can be funded or unfunded by political processes, and certainly is very much in the grips of the local politics of academe itself. The point is not that some absolute transcendence of the politics of competing material interests and precipitous substantive certainties either motivated by those interests, or manipulated in service to them have been completely transcended by the disciplines of law and science, but rather that some marginal degree of such transcendence has made significant inroads through these two methodologically-dominated spheres of our social institutional realm.
The major benefit of this procedural or methodological commitment is that, if well designed, it steadily increases The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, and does so at a constantly accelerating rate. The same methodologies can be used to continuously refine the methodologies themselves, and to continuously refine the procedures by which the procedures are refined, delving ever deeper into the The Algorithms of Complexity, just as the fictional character Algono did in the abstract metaphorical representation of this process in The Wizards’ Eye.
We are on a journey, both individually and collectively, both haphazardly and intentionally, toward ever deepening consciousness, and toward ever more holistic and robust implementations of that consciousness in the form of our social institutional and technological landscape. It is a journey which occurs both despite and due to our efforts, one whose path and destination are not predetermined, but whose logic will sweep us along slowly or quickly, painfully or happily, in service to some at the expense of others or in service to all at the expense of none. These are the dimensions along which our shared fate varies, dependent on the degree of compassion and wisdom we employ and cultivate, in ourselves and in those around us.
I have offered my own nascent view of a way in which we can participate more consciously and more effectively in this shared endeavor of ours, as I have defined it in this essay (see The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, or, for the more in-depth version, A Proposal). But that suggestion is just one starting point for discussion. The essential step, and the only thing we ever need agree on, is that we are capable of doing so much better than we are doing now, and that there is a conceptual framework that better serves our ability to do better than the blind ideologies to which we currently cling.
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The title refers to two things: 1) that which people mistake for sacred truth and fortify against any critical analysis or countervailing evidence; and 2) that which is critical analysis, or, more broadly, proven procedures and disciplines in service to the immutable and inarticulable underlying coherence of our existence. I’ll distinguish between them by putting the first (but not the second) in quotation marks.
The first consists of sacred scrolls (religious documents and philosophical tomes that state or legitimate the preferred dogma) and secular sages (those pundits or scholars who give voice to the preferred dogma). The quality of the substance of the dogma is not the defining characteristic, but rather the mere fact that it is an inflexible false certainty, an opinion held not via any real analysis on the part of the holder, but rather accepted as given truth. It is an error found across the political and religious spectrum, and is more prevalent than its absence. Humans are defined more by adherence to false “sacred truths” than to true ones.
The second meaning consists of processes forged in skepticism, in service to wonder, informed by humility, unclouded by malice. It is not comprised of articulable conclusions, but rather of processes and disciplines by which to arrive at them, and by the most basic premises which give those processes and disciplines meaning.
Even so, there are “true” sacred truths that can be put into words, though, paradoxically, the first one is that there aren’t: “The Tao of which we speak is not the eternal Tao.” We don’t know as much as we think we do or pretend to, and that which we reduce to words is something less than the absolute truth.
A second sacred truth is that we are parts of a whole, that “no man is an island entire of itself,” that we are comprised of smaller systems and comprise larger ones. This is one of the few substantive sacred truths, a recognition of coherence and systemicness to ourselves and our context, because without it, the disciplines which provide windows onto that coherence have no meaning. It is basically the realization that there is a coherent and comprehensible reality within which we are working, even if none of our understandings of it are ever complete and final.
Not all sacred truths belong to the left hemisphere of the brain; not all are based on reason and the procedures derived from it. Empathy, for instance, a sense of interconnectedness, is a sacred truth, an emotional rather than rational understanding of the systemicness and coherence described above.
But emotionally based factual certainties are false “sacred truths,” not true ones. People who bend facts to their preferences, or select from legitimately disputed facts or theories according to their emotional predilictions (imbuing their preferred conclusion with a degree of certainty incommensurate with its actual conclusiveness), are engaging in the folly of adhering to “sacred truths,” rather than the wisdom of being guided by sacred truths.
This is one of the fundamental challenges we face as humanity, as a people, as individuals: To admit to the degree of uncertainty that wise humility demands, and adhere to the disciplines and emotional foundations that well serve a wise and compassionate people.
(This is the most recent in a series of essays on this topic that can be found in the fifth box, titled “Dogmatic Ideology and its Avoidance,” at Catalogue of Selected Posts.)
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I sometimes hear progressives saying “It’s time for us to get angry; it worked for the Tea Party.” It also defines the Tea Party, and is among the reasons I oppose the Tea Party. I’m not saying that there’s never cause for anger; I’m saying that it should never be allowed to define us.
Instead, we should define ourselves first, and act in the world in service to that ideal, rather than allow ourselves to be defined by our frustrations, by some negative reaction to the world around us. Let others be the chest-thumping mindless apes. Someone has to strive to be the sentient beings, who lead the way toward something better.
What does it take to be sentient beings? A commitment, a desire, a discipline, an endless hunger to grow and aspire and invite and attract others to do the same. Let others thrive on their calls to arms; let’s instead engage in a call to minds. Let’s instead engage in a call to hearts. Let’s instead engage in a call to souls. We have called enough to our baser nature; it’s time to call to our nobler one.
This may be getting repetitive, and for that I apologize. I enjoy, more than anything, to tease out some hidden insight, some novel perspective, some aspect of the dance of nature around and through us that is not obvious, but is worthy of attention. But some things are less delicate, less unfamiliar, but no less worthy of attention for being mundane.
One such thing is our need to move, in as organized and passionate a manner as possible, in the direction of becoming advocates for a discipline that can be more effective, on multiple dimensions, than the sham of activism in which we are, in general, now engaged.
Some may recognize that this isn’t the first time I’ve referred to social institutional shams. I used the phrase “Kabuki Theater” not long ago to describe professional development workshops in public education, which are largely rituals of signifying a commitment to doing better rather than engaging in the actual discipline of doing better. But it is not a defect relegated only to ossified bureaucracies; it is a defect also found in our most passionate social institutional rites. No, the faces are not impassive in the shams of activism, but the results are as hollow.
WE ARE ABLE TO DO BETTER!!!! I can’t emphasize that enough, or often enough. We can do better. Just as for millenia humanity exercised the power of the mind through the haphazard accumulation of cultural belief systems, finally stumbling upon a methodology that unleashed its powers in phenomenal new ways; just as there was a time when trials by ordeal were all the rage, giving way to systems of law whose procedural discipline seems excessive to those who don’t realize what a triumph it really is; so too can we do better in every sphere of life, in every aspect of our endeavors.
The value of discipline, of methodology, of procedure, is not a new discovery; it has been a hallmark of spiritual and philosophical schools throughout history. The quest for nirvana may seem trite today, but it is no less compelling, no less authentic, than it was two and a half thousand years ago. It is, in essence, some shade of nirvana that we seek, some spiritual success realized through our own ability to tame our egos and realize our full potential in the process.
We do not necessarily have to sit in the lotus position and chant “om mani padme hum” to be, in essence, exercising a discipline that liberates the human spirit. We can, instead, escape the illusion of activism that is blindly invested in a superficial cycle, the endless trials by ordeal, of changing leadership and representation, and embrace in its place the realization of an activism that is more profound, more effective, and more compelling.
I have already sketched out what that discipline looks like (see, e.g., A Proposal, The Ultimate Political Challenge, The Voice Beyond Extremes, The Foundational Progressive Agenda, “A Theory of Justice”, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2, and “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few). But words are cheap, and acting on them is essential. To those who are already involved in this effort (e.g., “the coffee party”), let’s form bridges among our groups, form new groups, draw in new members, link to groups that are somewhat different in nature (e.g., Kiwanas,Rotary, church groups, HOAs, PTAs, park districts, school districts, everyone who is organized to do good works of any kind), trying to transcend rather than deepen the ideological divides, trying to create common ground rather than merely to smite enemies (and by doing so ensure that they remain enemies), building more hubs and spokes in expanding social networks all coalescing around the will to do better.
There are those who are quick to say that the opposition is not reasonable, and that trying to reason with them is the mistake that they are so angry about. And I say, the world is subtler than that. I do not argue that there is no place for hardball politics; I only argue that not every place is that place. I do not argue that there are not irrational and intransigent ideologues opposed to progress; I only argue that not everyone across the ideological divide is such a person. The real political battle has always been, and remains, the battle over the middle, over those who are not raging ideologues, over those who can be swayed. Such people are not swayed, but rather are repulsed, by raging ideology. While the Tea Party may seem to have been successful by trying to sway them with contorted faces and angry slogans, what they really did was to coalesce a base, and alienate the middle, at exactly the same time that many on the left thought that the smartest thing to do would be to alienate the middle as well, and thus lose the opportunity to be the only attractive political force left.
Obama won not because there was a huge mandate for expansive government, but rather because there was a huge mandate for hope and reason. Not everyone defines those virtues in the same way, and not everyone stayed on board as the policies themselves involved more government involvement than they were comfortable with. But hope and reason, not rage, are the truly attractive forces, the ones that attract not those who are already full of rage, but rather those who are not and don’t want to be.
So let’s recover that force, that momentum, that Obama unleashed in 2008. Let’s recover a commitment to hope and reason. Let’s agree to be slower to refute and quicker to consider; let’s agree to strive to find the words and attitude that resonate with those who can be swayed. Let’s agree to be reasonable, and humble, people of goodwill, working together to do the best we can. And let’s make that an attractive place to be. Real, and sustainable, progress depends on it.
Contact me, here or by other channels, if you’d like to be a part of an effort to organize along these lines. All reasonable people of goodwill have a responsibility to work as hard at turning this vision into a reality as others, all across the political spectrum, work at obstructing it.
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For those who don’t get the title pun, we sometimes imagine that science (i.e., the social institution based on the modern scientific method) is in a class by itself, definitively removed from the sloppy human efforts to understand our world and universe that preceded its invention. But, unsurprisingly, it is a very human enterprise. Our efforts to conceptualize the wonders and complexities around us have always been sloppy and imperfect. The development of scientific methodology represents a major advance in disciplining that process, but not transcendence of inevitable human messiness. Thus, while we have somewhat cleaned up our processes of conceptualization in the modern era, there is still no such thing as immaculate conception.
Cute, huh? But, wait. There’s more. The fact that science is messy doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. Our vision of the world that has emanated from this slight refinement of our messy observational and interpretive processes is very real and significant. We do indeed have a deeper, sharper, and more reliable understanding of causal relationships, both in general and particular. And, when it comes to discerning verifiable facts and systemic dynamics, a scientific perspective is superior to any alternative. We know, for instance, that the sun rises and sets because the Earth rotates, rather than, for instance, because it is drawn by a chariot across the sky. We understand lightening as the electrical, meteorological phenomenon that it is, rather than as a bolt hurled by a god. And we understand human biological conception as involving the fertilization of a female egg by a male sperm, always. No exceptions. There’s no such thing as immaculate conception.
Scientific misconduct, such as the recent example involving a Harvard psychology professor’s research on primate cognition (http://www.economist.com/node/16886218), proves that there is, in the first sense described above, no such thing as immaculate conception: We are still firmly within the realm of a messy human process, polluted by political and pecuniary motivations and pressures, made marginally less reliable by the irreducible residue of unreliability inherent to human behavior. But it doesn’t undermine what science has more generally proven over the course of centuries, the cumulative refinement in understanding of the systems which encompass us: Despite our lack of immaculate conception, there is still no such thing as immaculate conception.
There are those who, for unscientific dogmatic reasons of their own, want to refute widespread and generalized findings of science by reference to specific instances of the human messiness of science. Global warming deniers, for instance, certain that they can credibly claim that global warming is still a question in legitimate dispute, point to the emails exchanged among particular researchers referring to specific instances bringing into question specific pieces of data. But climate science is decades all, involving thousands of researchers spread out all over the world, and an accumulation of data that is truly extraordinary and overwhelmingly consistent in the systemic trends it reveals. No specific instances of individual malfeasance (even if that were the case, which it wasn’t in this instance) would disprove the cumulative weight of that collective scientific enterprise. There is no vast scientific conspiracy to pull the wool over right-wing radicals’ eyes.
Some don’t wait for specific instances of malfeasance to refute inconvenient findings of science. They rely instead on an organized ignorance of what science is, and what it isn’t. When I was a high school teacher, the christian fundamentalist parents of one of my students objected to my using genetic diffusion and innovation (i.e., evolution) in a comparison to cultural diffusion and innovation in world geography class (I had offered to let their son excuse himself from class if the topic ever came up again). In an email from the father, he referred me to a website that offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove that the theory of evolution was true. I tried to explain to him that it is the nature of scientific theories that they can never be “proven” true; they merely keep getting stronger due to accumulating supportive evidence, an absence of definitively refutational evidence, and a general scarcity of even mildly incompatible evidence. But, to someone with a dogmatic belief that they want to defend against science, all they need is a construction of reality which isolates the entire corpus of mildly inconsistent evidence, combining that with the inability of their opponents to prove what is not amenable to proof, and they have their own immaculate conception, cleansed of the systematic application of reason which stands against it.
It’s appropriate that this post about science, acknowledging its contamination by motivated human behaviors but recognizing that that contamination doesn’t discredit the overarching enterprise, follows my post about religion (“Is Religion A Force For Good?” ), in which I broke religion down to its constituent elements, identifying its beneficial and detrimental aspects, and drawing attention to the fact that the latter are not peculiar to religions, but rather are elements found in other forms of human cognition as well. No matter what lens we are using to understand the world in any given moment, it is more a matter of how we use that lens than what the lens is. And the best lens of all is composed of the best elements of each, synthesized into a coherent whole, and utilized with integrity and humility.
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I take the title question from The Economist (http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/592), but think it implies a false dichotomy, that religion either is, or is not, a force for good. The truth, fairly obviously, is that in some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. Making some assessment of net value (whether religion is on balance a force for good) is fraught with difficulties. But exploring the issue reveals valuable insights into which elements of religion, found both within religion and without, contribute to or obstruct the greater human enterprise.
The title question, furthermore, begs the questions of what constitutes “good”, and what constitutes “religion”, issues trickier and more elusive than they might appear to be at first glance, issues whose on-going clarification is among the universe of “good” to be produced or obstructed by better or worse cognitive tools. And it brushes by the issue of whether it makes sense to discuss “religion” as some monolithic institution that can be, or not be, evaluated en masse in any meaningful way. But, despite these complexities, it raises a fundamental question, with broader implications than are immediately obvious.
In reality, religion is at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “good”, and at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “evil”, assuming some intuitive definition of these two terms. As a generator of, and focal point for, the “emotional energy” (to use sociologist Randall Collins’ phrase) around which societies coalesce, it may be a fundamental form of the cohesive social force which binds us into functioning collectivities. Just as attendees at rock concerts and sporting events, by sharing an intense emotional experience, feel bonded into something larger than themselves, so too (and to a much greater extent) belonging to a religious order creates a constant undercurrent of that same socially binding emotional energy. This is most evident in religious ceremonies that are designed to excite that emotional energy, sometimes ostentatiously, sometimes in a more subdued form.
One can argue, conversely, that while that was religion’s historical role, essential to the primative formation of both tribal socieities and larger civilizations (almost always defined by a shared religion), it is one which is no longer needed in our modern, decentralized, organically coherent social institutional order. After all, there’s no reason to believe that our modern governments, markets, and plethora of functioning secular social institutions would simply evaporate if religion were suddenly removed from the mix. Religion, arguably, is an archaic remnant of an ancient past, persisting due both to its hold over human imaginations and the vested interests that actively perpetuate it, but no longer either a functional necessity or the most useful of available social institutional tools.
But some religions clearly do some things which most would say contribute to the public good. Leaving aside the question of religion’s value in the lives of individual adherents, there is no denying the “good works” that are performed by religious orders. Soup kitchens, charitable activities, and even community social functions all must be tallied on the positive side of the ledger.
These activities are not always unambiguously good, however. Radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories, at least to some extent definable as religious or religion-based orders, do good works in part in order to gain popular support and recruit people to their cause, a cause steeped in violence. Similarly, Israeli right-wing extremists are often also religious extremists, believing that, since the land was given to them by God, they owe the non-Jewish people who were and are living on it no respect or accommodation. Undoubtedly, their good works among themselves reinforce their solidarity in opposition to others.
This is a fundamental paradox about socially consolidating forces: They increase solidarity within a group, which is beneficial for that group, but also increase the emotional strength of the boundaries between groups, which is detrimental to the ability of those groups to cooperate in order to confront intergroup challenges and opportunities. Like tribalism, nationalism, and even racism, religious solidarity tends to foster interreligious antagonism.
We are served best by vertically (and horizontally) non-exclusive, mutually reinforcing social solidarities, in which belonging at one level facilitates rather than obstructs belonging at superordinate and subordinate levels. While some (far from all) modern religious orders make some (far from comprehensive) effort to move in this more functional direction, it is an effort that swims against the historical current of, at least, the three monotheistic world religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
This mutual exclusivity has implications for how “good” is defined. To some, “a force for good” is a force which ensures that their own dogma prevails. In such a belief system, it would be the implacable missionary and jihadist zeal that would be considered a force for good, and the move toward tolerance and mutual accommodation a force for evil. In far too many debates with right-wingers, I am quickly cast as a moral and ontological relativist for not accepting that their moral and ontological assumptions are absolute and irrefutable truths.
Those doing so confuse recognition of fallability for relativism, and ethnocentric chauvinism for mere recognition of a an objectively discernible reality. The more subtle and useful perspective is to recognize that there may be moral and ontological absolutes, but that our ability to discern what they are is imperfect. Therefore, we should not confuse failure of others to adhere to our own convictions with a failure to acknowledge the existence of objective reality.
But even leaving aside this war of competing dogmas (with, for instance, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists being remarkably similar and yet completely incapable of peacefully coexisting), discerning what is “good” is somewhat similar to discerning what “quality” means, a topic which Robert Pirsig intriguingly explored in his cult classic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a theme I discussed, in reference to moral absolutism, in The Elusive Truth ). Is it better, for instance, to maximize aggregate wealth, or to minimize “the gini coefficient” (the statistical measure of the inequality in the distribution of wealth)? Most (though certainly not all) would probably agree that the maximum good lies in some balance of these two values, though the range of belief of what that balance should be fill the spectrum, with extremists happily ensconced at either pole.
Or, more apropos of religion: Is a greater good served by protecting zygotes from destruction or by helping to expedite the discovery of effective treatments for crippling diseases through embryonic stem cell research? Is a greater good served by preserving the rights of women over their own bodies, or by protecting fetuses from elective abortions? Is a greater good served by ending the discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, or by “preserving the sanctity” of heterosexual marriage? We each may strongly believe we know the answers to these questions, but there is no consensus, and there is no final arbiter to which to turn for the answers as a matter of ontological and moral certainty (though there may be to find the legal resolutions of these disagreements).
Not only is the object (“a force for good”) ambiguous and elusive, so too is the subject. What is “religion”? Most people would say that the defining characteristic is some reference to the divine, by which definition Buddhism is not technically a religion (and Taoism may not be either). But aren’t all-encompassing world views members of some shared category, one which is dominated by religions? Wouldn’t that definition, rather than the reference to the divine, be at least as reasonable a definition? And might that not include most comprehensive political ideologies, including, perhaps, whatever political ideologies you or I consider to be the best and worst, respectively? In which case, some religions, broadly defined, are forces for good, and some for bad, but we’re stuck duking out which is which, not unlike fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.
Furthermore, how broad is “the divine” (if we choose to cling to that more traditional definition)? Does it include all that is supernatural or mystical in nature, such as a belief in ghosts, or in ouija boards, or in New Age fads such as the cosmic-energy-focusing power of tin-foil pyramids on one’s head? If not, why not?
As with many things, our traditional categories are less useful for addressing fundamental, underlying questions than we at first assume them to be. We need to break the world down into more essential conceptual elements, ones that do not have such unstable boundaries. And we need to understand those elemental concepts in terms of continua of variation rather than as dichotomous or mutually exclusive categories. So, for instance, beliefs can be more or less dogmatic, or more or less analytical. It does not really matter whether they are religious or not; it matters whether they serve more to liberate our individual and collective genius, or serve more to imprison it.
While there are similarities that are too often overlooked (such as in their shared foundation in a sense of awe), religious and scientific thought in some ways embody this distinction, in that the former is based on “Faith” (the unquestioning and unquestionable certainty of a proposition) and the latter on “scepticism” (the assumption that nothing should be taken to be the truth until it has been demonstrated to be the truth, and even then, only tentatively so, always subject to new evidence and argumentation). And scientific thought has clearly been a very robust generator of useful knowledge. But the distinction can be exaggerated, and the similarities ignored.
Science, like religion, has immutable precepts at its base, such as the belief in an objectively discernible reality, in our ability to discern it, in the validity of the scientific method as a means of doing so, and in the culturally and subjectively independent validity of its products. Or the belief that reality can be reduced to its constituent parts, without biasing the worldview thus created.
And science, like religion, is based in awe, which may be the real essence of Faith. I have faith that there is some coherent, enormous, systemic reality of which I am a part, far beyond my powers of comprehension, but overwhelmingly compelling in its beauty and complexity and subtlety. That is what I call “pure Faith,” a faith that has no object, no icon, no reductionism on which to hang it, though a recognition that, as in science, various reductionisms can be useful tools in examining it. What we call “religions” are to me part of the huge and gorgeous corpus of world mythology, brilliant, subtle, complex metaphors reaching into the heart of that wondrous suchness and rendering it into stories and forms and rituals that make it accessible.
A scientific understanding of the world divorced from that ecstatic, imaginative “faith-based” one would be dry and incomplete. One can analyze a river, its constituent elements and molecules, the dynamics of flow, but still be missing some appreciation of its essence that is captured in seeing that river as mischievous nymphs singing and dancing their way to the sea. Poetry and fiction are not science, but they are a part of our appreciation and celebration of the world in which we live. Religion is the original context of poetry and stories, one whose essence, at least, should certainly be retained in order to continue to generate such expressions of our passion and wonder.
My dad was a devout atheist, and I saw in him the very same error that had so passionately led him to the absolute rejection of the validity of religious belief: Implacable dogmatic certainty. The problem with such certainty isn’t that it sometimes embraces a good idea, and sometimes a bad one, but rather that it always reduces an infinitely complex reality to some oversimplification or another which then becomes impervious to refinement. We can’t help but to reduce reality to manageable conceptualizations, but we can avoid fortifying those conceptualizations against the lathe of new information and insight.
And that is the crux of the matter. The more strongly one adheres to dogmatic substantive certainties, the more their belief system, whether religious or secular, is a force for bad, by crippling our ability to use our most vital resource, our human mind. And the more one subjugates substantive understandings to a combination of an essentially religious humility with procedural methodologies designed to best allow reason to prevail, to best allow the lathe of new information and new insight to continue to carve our substantive understandings, the more that conceptual framework is a force for good.
Even the substantive beliefs about the procedural methodology have to be subjected to that methodology, so that the methodology itself can evolve. In short, we need to be systematically and imaginatively uncertain, in a way which does not increase certainty, but rather increases understanding.
It is not religion, but rather dogma which is the counterproductive force we must seek to transcend. Secular dogmas are as dangerous and destructive as religious ones, and religious channeling of our wonder and compassion is as productive and useful as any other channeling of such qualities.
The Tea Party, though strongly overlapping with Right-wing Christian fundamentalism, is based on a secular dogma of its own, one which includes what has aptly been called “Constitutional Idolatry”, signalling its quasi-religious nature. But what makes it quasi-religious is its dogmatic reductionism, its reliance on oversimplistic platitudes, not some aspect that is overtly religious.
Even dogma in science is counterproductive, and not in short supply. The premature closing of the mind, the embrace of certainties that are not certain, and are not subtle enough to encompass the complexity they claim to definitively capture, is what we must avoid and oppose, in all contexts.
The best force for good is the best blend of the most useful cognitive material from all sectors of thought and action. Religious recognition of the sublime nature of the universe, our imagination and sometimes ecstatic artistic perceptions, our emotional connection to other people and other creatures, our recognition that in a world of competing factual and theoretical claims all of them must be subjected to an impartial procedures for separating the arbitrary from the well-founded and selecting among competing views, are all components of that cognitive concoction which most effectively liberates the genius within us, and thus best serves our long-term collective welfare.
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Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!
It’s not news that political advertising is deceptive (http://www.denverpost.com/election2010/ci_16264271), that our treatment of electoral politics as a spectator sport trivializes it, and that our oversimplistic reduction of the challenges we face to platitudes and slogans creates a noisy obstacle to governing ourselves intelligently and effectively. The blogosphere does not help, amplifying the noise rather than cutting through it (One Colorado Pols blogger, in a moment of unintentional irony, wrote that my choice to focus on understanding and discussing issues, including spending lots of time talking with people in my district, rather than raising money and playing the political marketing game, made a mockery of the political process). Grass roots movements are choked with the crabgrass of superficiality.
The most fundamental issues we face are not taxes, services, or even campaign finance reform. They’re not health care or civil liberties or any of the other substantive issues that occupy our attention and directly affect our lives. The most fundamental issues are, as always, procedural, on how most effectively to solve substantive issues and resolve political disputes. The most fundamental issue is: How do we refine our political process to better liberate rather than distract our collective genius, to apply our thoughts and actions to the challenge of improving the quality of our lives rather than to the challenge of winning the cock fights of dueling false certainties?
I understand the temptation to focus exclusively on accomplishing small gains through traditional means, rather than acknowledging the need to tackle the fundamental, long-term political challenges we face. It’s as though we’re trapped in a pit, fighting over the scraps within it rather than working together to climb out. It may not be possible to turn our backs on the brawl constantly underway in this pit of politics in which we’re trapped, but we have to find ways to free ourselves enough of its immediate demands that we can attend at least marginally to the ultimate goal: Getting out of the pit. And that means refining the political process, hopefully enough to constitute a complete paradigm shift (see The Politics of Consciousness).
I’ve written that, to confront this fundamental political issue, there are three “virtues” we must emphasize: Reason, goodwill, and humility (or perhaps “skepticism”, the reluctance to assume that anything is true until it is well demonstrated) (The Foundational Progressive Agenda ). I am not arguing that we can just ignore the implications of being trapped in the pit of politics-as-usual, and dedicate ourselves exclusively to promoting these three virtues. As Henry Kissinger once said in a different context, that would only succeed in ceding the world to the most ruthless. But neither should we be satisfied with winning brawls in the pit, never attending to the more fundamental challenge of getting out of it altogether.
The irony and frustration of the human condition is that we’re capable of doing so much better. If we were able to address ourselves, as a society, as a world, to the collective enterprise of creating an ever more robust, sustainable, and fair global civilization, we’d be able to create a far less brutal, and far more accommodating, context for our lives. While it’s true that stating this does not move us toward it, and that the challenge of getting people on board, agreeing to work together to address ourselves to these most fundamental of substantive challenges, is as daunting as any we face, it’s also true that progress can be made on this front. And it behooves us to do so.
We need a new social movement, one that is not about the scraps in the pit, but about getting out of the pit altogether. We need a movement that suspends discussion (in the context of that movement) of all of the particular substantive policies and issues we are brawling over, and addresses instead the challenge of getting us more focused on working together as teammates in a collective endeavor, facing shared challenges and opportunities.
This is not something that candidates and office holders can, or perhaps even should, attend to. This is not something that the political parties can, or perhaps even should, attend to. But it is something that we, as a people, have to attend to. We have squandered the wealth of our genius far too egregiously for far too long.
Human history is about cumulative and threshold advances in how well we tap and utilize our genius. One of the best examples of a threshold improvement is the development of the scientific method, which vastly increased the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we generated through our observations of and inferences about the world around us. Making such advances is neither beyond our grasp, nor accomplished independently of the individual and organized efforts of living human beings to accomplish them.
The similarities between politics and science are not trivial. Both involve competing views, passionately held. Both involve bitter rivalries, brutal battles, and eventual outcomes that favor some ideas over others. Both involve resolutions that affect our lives. The main difference is that, in science, we have tamed this process to a far greater extent than we have tamed it in politics. And the benefits of having done so are astronomical.
The advance represented by the scientific revolution is a procedural one, not a substantive one. It is the creation of a more robust and less arbitrary methodology, reducing the casual and drawn-out processes of trial and error to a focused process of systematic investigation. If we can implement such a wondrous step in how we understand the nature of the world and universe around and within us, then we can certainly at least contemplate the possibility of implementing a similarly wondrous step in how we coordinate and frame our shared existence.
In fact, Science is a special cut-out from the universe of politics. Fighting over what is and is not true is a fundamentally political enterprise (see The Politics of Consciousness). Issues that we now recognize to fall clearly under the umbrella of science were once clearly merely political, with equallly rancorous conflicts of power and organization over which vision of the world would prevail. Eventually, to a large if forever incomplete degree, the preeminence of the scientific method to determine what is true and what isn’t, to frame those brawls within an agreed-upon procedure that maximized the influence of reason upon the outcome, to determine what causes result in what effects, has become widely accepted. The challenge now is to continue to subject all political disputes on matters that can be to scientific methodology (we already do, but relegated to the margins of political discourse), and, more dauntingly, to cultivate an agreement that we will privilege those conclusions over others more haphazardly arrived at.
We need a social movement that advances the notion that investing ourselves in the science of self-governance is good for humanity, that creating a context in which it is not just those who shout the loudest, but those who have best applied reason to the most reliable evidence, that prevail. We need to keep fighting to be a more enlightened society. That is the most fundamental political battle of all.
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