Midnight in the kindergarten of good and evil
By Spengler
Is morality possible without religion? Since German philosopher Immanuel Kant
offered a "what-if-everybody-did" rule in 1788, modern philosophers have
cracked their skulls against the problem without success. Kant's rule requires
you to tell the truth at all times, for example, when a pederast inquires as to
your child's route home from grade school. It was not a popular idea. Twentieth
century secular philosophers declared the problem irrelevant. According to
existentialists like Martin Heidegger, another German philosopher, authenticity
rather than virtue is what is important, even if leads to Nazi party
membership, while
pragmatists like the just-deceased American philosopher Richard Rorty assert
that we cannot make objectively true statements about anything.
Most atheists still want to know how to tell right from wrong, however. They
are alarmed by the return of religious wars and the violence associated with
religious fanaticism. Sadly, the withdrawal of the philosophers has put the
secular morality project into the hands of mere mechanics, the so-called brain
scientists. Those who think abstractly about thought, the metaphysicians, can
offer no secular solution, and the matter has gone by default to the lab
technicians.
Call it the kindergarten of good and evil. The invention of gadgets that show
us which neurons light up when we think happy thoughts has convinced some
secular thinkers that they have found the solution to a problem unsolved by
thousands of years of philosophical speculation.
As Canadian-American political and cultural commentator David Brooks observed
in the May 13 New York Times, "The real challenge [to religion] is going to
come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that
particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal
human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit
with Buddhism."
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted
away from hardcore materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It
does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness
seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.
Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of
thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral
intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to
have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of
the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can
actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease
in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to
have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that
feels more real.
American Sam Harris' 2005 bestseller The End
of Faith makes a nearly identical argument, that "there will probably
come a time when we achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness, and of
ethical judgments themselves, on the level of the brain".
It seems strange to assert that "people have deep instincts for fairness [and]
empathy". Research summarized by British-born Nicholas Wade in his 2006 book Before
the Dawn shows that continuous warfare dominated prehistoric life, such
that 40% of males died in warfare. Even stranger is the association of such an
approach with Buddhism, given that Zen Buddhism took hold in Japan as a warrior
religion.
If we leave aside such quibbles and focus on the nub of the matter, it all
comes down to what Brooks calls the measurability of "elevated spiritual
states" and "transcendent experiences". It is not very difficult to induce such
an experience, nor is it particularly interesting. If you deprive a test
subject of sight, sound and all other sensations, you will have a case of
temporary insanity on your hands.
Sensory deprivation is a cruelly effective form of torture. Something like this
can be achieved by taking certain drugs, or by staring at one's navel and
repeating a mantra long enough. Our identity depends on a set of relationships,
and if we block out those relationships, we lose our sense of identity, or
dissociate. One also can employ sensory deprivation for enhanced concentration
or relaxation, which is why Zen is so useful to warriors and yoga is so useful
to mystics.
Transcendental experience, though, may not have anything to do with a sense of
dissolving into the All. Western classical music can induce a transcendental
state of an entirely different kind. Musicians often experience an entirely
different sort of transcendental experience while playing or singing an
individual part in an orchestra or chorus. Each musician's identity remains in
sharp delineation while hearing the other parts across space, and the
progression of the composition in time. One hears oneself play, and overhears
one's colleagues, within the teleology of the composition. The totality of the
composition has a life of its own, but it enhances rather than dissolves the
individuality of the individual performer, without whose unique contribution
the totality could not exist.
Whether the same neural paths light up for the alto section singing German
composer George Frideric Handel's Messiah as for a Zen master I do not
know, but the transcendental experience is entirely different. That is the
experience of Christian or Jewish worship: the more one identifies with the
congregation, the more one's individual personhood if magnified. Now that 30
million Chinese study piano and another 10 million study violin, Western
classical music well may have become the dominant form of transcendental
experience for Asians even while Western neuroscientists dabble in what they
think is Buddhism.
When the kindergartners speak of "consciousness" and "transcendence", they
approach the matter as handworkers: whatever their instruments can measure is
what comes to their attention. The idea that the same neurons might light up
for entirely different sorts of consciousness never appears on their mental
horizon.
It is a shibboleth that consciousness is social. One may have an oceanic
experience of joining an ocean of humanity shouting "Heil Hitler!" at a rally,
while charging the machine guns at the Somme, while singing hymns on Sunday
morning (or Psalms on Saturday morning), or while watching the fireworks at a
small-town celebration of July 4. All of these are social forms of
consciousness, but they have radically different contents. One dissolves into
the mass at a Nazi rally, but shines through the choir at a Christian service,
because one feels loved as an individual, up close and personally. That is why
(as I mentioned last week -
America's special grace Americans love their country in a unique way,
because they believe it was instituted to protect their God-given rights.
The kindergartners cannot concede that humans have a soul, and struggle to find
an explanation for why we are conscious of an individual identity. "While we
know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary
terms, we currently have no idea why it is 'like something' to be what we are,"
Harris wrote. To investigate consciousness he suggests "fasting, chanting,
sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation and the use of psychotropic drugs", as
"some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can
be deliberately transformed". English writer G K Chesterton's quip comes to
mind that if you don't believe in God, you will believe in anything. The term
"deliberately transformed" makes my hair stand on end, but let us leave that
for later.
Consciousness for the kindergartners is the mental state of the test subject in
the laboratory. But our consciousness extends far beyond the walls of the
laboratory, to all our countrymen or co-religionists, and in time to our
ancestors and our progeny. We exist not for ourselves but for those to whom we
owe our existence, and for those who will owe their existence to us. We
communicate through languages that are woven together out of innumerable
aphorisms, quips, and metaphors that bind generations together. We share songs,
stories and dramas that provide points of reference across time.
When Sam Harris uses the word "faith" to mean the same as "superstition", a
belief to which we hold irrationally and without foundation. But faith is just
as social as consciousness: it is participation in the life of a people. As
Warsaw-born American rabbi A J Heschel said, Judaism is a continuation of the
life of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; British-Irish writer C S Lewis wrote, "In
Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him
is to be put into us." Christianity is not a belief-system but a life lived in
anticipation of the Kingdom of God. Resurrection in the flesh, the tenet of
revealed religion that most offends modern sensibility, is an outgrowth of
belief in the eternal life of the People of God, as Jon Levenson and Kevin
Madigan showed in their recent book [Life
and Death in the Bible, Asia Times Online, May 28, 2008.]
In revealed religion, the consciousness of each member of the congregation
resembles the playing of the individual musician in the classical orchestra: it
is a sense of belonging combined with a deep sense of individual importance
arising from God's particular love of each individual. The difference between
this "transcendent experience" and that of a mob may or may not measure on the
kindergartners' instruments, but that is of little concern. Classical music is
the most Christian of art forms, as I wrote in an early essay (Why
the beautiful is not the good Asia Times Online, May 17, 2005 ).
Polyphony combines contrasting lines of music into a harmonious whole as
Christian society preserves the sanctity of the individual within the
congregation.
Different faiths entail radically different forms of consciousness, and
different faiths are different lives; the life of the Qahal and the Ekklesia
are different from the life of the ummah. Harris imagines that Muslims
blow themselves up to gain entry to paradise, yet pagans have immolated
themselves for the perpetuation of their tribe with sickening regularity. It is
in the existential experience of Muslim life rather than in the declared tenets
of Islam that the motivation of suicide bombers must be sought..
This brings us to the aspect of human consciousness that the kindergartners
never will explain, namely its penchant for self-destruction when its life
loses hope of continuity. At least half of extant cultures (defined by
languages) will cease to exist during the next century, and perhaps nine-tenths
of all spoken languages will become extinct a century later. Thousands of years
of human consciousness simply will expire for lack of desire to continue. No
barbarian invasion, no drought or famine or pestilence has brought about the
Great Extinction of the Peoples, but rather a desire to perish.
How many thousands of cases of cultural extinction are required to impress the
self-styled empiricists of human consciousness is a question to which I expect
no answer. Nonetheless it does prove something important, namely the existence
of Free Will. At very least human communities can choose to will themselves out
of existence. One can explain behaviors based economics, geography, genetics or
some other material circumstance with a degree of plausibility - American Jared
Diamond attempts to do so in Guns, Germs and Steel - but the singular
and unrepeatable act of cultural suicide can find no material explanation
whatever.
It goes without saying that the self-annihilation of nations also makes short
work of what passed for "natural theology" during the Enlightenment, for it
shatters the premise that humankind has an animal instinct of
self-preservation. Saint Augustine's anthropology - that the heart is restless
until if finds God - also can imagine a heart that sickens unto death in the
absence of God.
Free will, to the kindergartners, is an abomination, for if man has no soul,
and consciousness has no origin but the conflux of influences, the concept of a
will is absurd. "No one has ever described a manner in which mental and
physical events could arise that would attest to its existence," complains
Harris.
In the absence of Biblical morality, what instruction should we take from the
kindergartners? To his credit, Harris rejects the evolutionary view of
morality. "Nature has selected for many things that we would have done well to
leave behind us in the jungles of Africa. The practice of rape may have once
conferred an adaptive advantage on our species - and rapists of all shapes and
sciences can indeed be found in the natural world (dolphins, orangutans,
chimpanzees, etc.)." For similar reasons he rejects pragmatism and relativism.
What sort of ethics do the kindergartners propose? Harris' chapter, "A science
of good and evil," simply repeats Kant's creaky categorical imperative with a
few exceptions thrown in, for example, the right to torture terrorists or
inflict collateral damage on civilians where anti-terror actions require it. In
short, Harris wants to have his Kant, and eat it, too. This would earn a
D-minus from any introductory course on philosophy, but that is of no
importance to Harris, who knows that atheism has been hung out to dry by the
philosophers, and has no reason to care how they might grade him.
What he wants is an unspecified code of ethics that eventually will arise from
brain science, such that people can be "deliberately transformed" by
appropriate conditioning. Why is that different from English writer Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World dystopia? It does not seem to occur to him that
that most hideous crimes against humanity on record have been committed not in
the name of faith, but in the name of science - Karl Marx's dialectical
materialism or Adolf Hitler's race science. Communism, he asserts, "was little
more than a political religion". That is an instance of the True Scotsman
fallacy (if a Scotsman takes sugar with his porridge, he is not a "true
Scotsman"); if an ideology does harm, then Harris thinks it must be a religion.
Fortunately the kindergartners of brain science never will have the opportunity
to put human society into their machines and "deliberately transform" our
consciousness. Once the secular philosophers retreated from ethics, the
white-coated laboratory types who were left in possession of the asylum can
watch neurons light up all day, without having a relevant word to say about the
existential condition of humankind.
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