The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.
In John, 10:34, Jesus answered them: "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods?'"
I'm gonna have to go with the Rabbi and married man Jesus here. Realize you are god and act accordingly.
Some may think, upon realization and a rather deep internalization of their New Identity, that this gives them carte blanche to lord it over others. But that would be a misuse of your superhero-ish newfound god status; someone once said something to the effect that godsmanship has its benefits for sure, but it also carries with it some big responsibilities. If you meet someone and they haven't yet realized they are a god or goddess, give them the benefit of the doubt: they are Holy too. They just haven't realized it yet.
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, head of the Church of the Subgenius
When I read in their first Holy Book, "You'll pay to find out
what you think!," I was on board. If you ask me, Mitt Romney
looks WAY too much like "Bob." It's...indecent.
I do not self-identify as a Christian. If I had to identify as anything, go ahead and put me down as some variety of Discordian/Subgenius/Mystical Agnostic/Dionysian. Awe and lotsa laffs, sex and intoxication and music are strictly de rigeur in any religion or anti-religion that might have a congenital non-joiner like myself as a member.
But this passage in John has always puzzled me: why don't people talk about it more? When I first read this, on my own, as a long-haired heathen/pagan/heavy metal rock guitarist around age 19 or 20, I thought, "Whoa! Check out Jesus's ethical gambit here! The rhetoric is solid: his audience knew the scripture. Check the Law book! Look in the Torah. It's right there. 'I have said you are gods.' Now: live accordingly. Brilliant move!"
A Disciple: Wait...where is that? I guess I skimmed past it...Can I get a page number? Jesus? Where is that...
Jesus (somewhat nervously): Somewhere near the back. But that's not the point. Believe me!
Somehow most folks seem to have not paid much attention to this bit, or they went off and interpreted it in some odd or less salutary way. And me, alienated always, just wondered why people insisted they were less than gods and goddesses. I still wonder. But I try not to think about it too much. It seems like one helluva missed opportunity. One of those bottlenecks in history. Missed it by that much, Chief.
I love this rendering of Eris, Goddess of Chaos, who bears much
responsibility for the Trojan War, and therefore The Iliad,
The Odyssey, a bunch of other books and thoughts and art, and
James Joyce'sUlysses. You don't cross Eris and get away with it.
If anyone knows who the artist is here, please write me so I can
give credit...I don't want to cause any sort of Havoc!
Sorry: No Elaboration on McCullough and Religion and Self-Control
I wanted to elaborate on my last post, and had a link in my scatterbrained files for an article that seemed to want to address the issue of religion and self-control. The title of the article was "Does Thinking About God Increase Our Self-Control?" The link was dead, with no explanation. Then I realized: it had been written by Jonah Lehrer, for Wired. I will let the sad irony play out in your own nervous system...
The venerable Wikipedia (as of today's date) gives Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island - a science fiction-y psychedelic utopian thing from 1961 - as showing the first use of the word "neurotheology," but the idea seems to have been around ever since hardcore materialism got going. William James seems to be hinting at neurotheology in his fantastic and still relevant and readable 1890 textbook Principles of Psychology, which Borges was influenced by, and which reads to me now as proto-cognitive science, 65 years before it was invented.
The quintessential American philosopher: William James
The very term "neurotheology" has proven offensive for some scholars, and the main charge has been reductionism. Huston Smith makes perhaps the best case against the discipline. Indeed, the physical sciences seem resistant to the idea, and apparently very few scholarly papers use the term. An alternate term, "neuroscience of religion," for some reason, appears more upright. But only by a little. I've also seen "spiritual neuroscience."
Of all the arguments against various neurotheological experiments I do find the "reductionist" charge compelling, but not because I really do think Gee Oh Dee really exists "out there" (although I don't discount some odd energy form or synergetic system in Nature that one might qualify as something godlike); rather, the philosophical term qualia - the ineffable is-ness of some experience that cannot possibly be nailed down by any measurement, equation, lit-up brain area in an fMRI, or sequence of poetic words - has me admitting that indeed and ironically: "Whatever we say about God is not true." (Experiment: try to do complete justice to the act of drinking a cold beer on a hot day, or having a totally satisfying orgasm...and these are simple "physical" acts/mindstates!)
Still: finding the neurobiological basis for religious experience in the nervous system appeals to my heretical weirdo overweening lust for dreaming about pushing a button and having a religious experience at will. Or ingesting certain plants or fungi, ya know? Albeit this vision seems horribly reductive, yet an experience is an experience, and that phenomenological experience "is" really "real" to the experiencer, despite the known quantities. One may counter those charging the investigators of neurotheology with "reductionism" by asserting it's - au contraire - "productive."
It seems to me a thoroughgoing all-out blitz to find out more about Non-Ordinary Experience (which admit it: we all want, but on our own terms) will boldly show us much more about who we are as a species.
As I see it, we're still in the Dark Ages here. Every now and then I think I can see a Renaissance up ahead, but then I may be prone to wishful thinking.
Finding "God" or gods or ineffable "spiritual" experience as purely mental processes, possibly located in one section of one lobe or another, or an influx of some neurochemical upon general brain systems...all suggest the normal science of materialism and yet it seems heretical. Upstanding scientists of impeccable credential ought to stay away from godstuff, perhaps. Taints the rep. Admits the woo-woo. Stay away! If only for your career prospects! My god, man! Hic sunt leones, etc.
And nonetheless, more and more intrepid researchers have been looking into the solely neurobiological basis of goddesses, gods, God, et.al, increasingly over the past 30 years, and I'll be discussing a few in passing as I go on.
Back to Dr.William James (his 1890 textbook is, along with Ulysses and Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy and a few others, one of my perpetual bedside books, so marvelous is it): "But whether we take it abstractly or concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process, is a result of our abandoning the outward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers." (ch. 10, "The Consciousness of Self," italics in original)
Dr. John Lilly, one of my favorite "mad" scientists
This seems a prefiguration of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson's take on Dr.Timothy Leary's metaphorical circuit in the brain that has to do with "metaprogramming." In the 1950s and 60s, Leary and many other investigators attempted to merge psychology with rare, "emergent" mental states in human evolution. RAW saw a very long historical lineage of worldwide mystics and scientifically-minded explorers who noted that thinking about thinking seemed to represent a qualitative change in a general orientation towards thought. By thinking about thinking about thinking, or reflecting on the nature of thought and our symbolic systems, we seem to have bootstrapped our species into some Other Level of mind. The word "metaprogramming" was taken up from scientist-polymath Dr. John Lilly, who in turn used a metaphor borrowed from early computer science.
Speaking of "Meta- " and Thinking About Thinking
In a glossary preface to his 1980 book The Illuminati Papers, RAW gives us this:
Neuro -
A prefix denoting "known by or through the human nervous system." Thus we have no physics but neurophysics, no psychology but neuropsychology, no linguistics but neurolinguistics, and, ultimately, no neurology but neuroneurology, and no neuroneurology but neuroneuroneurology, etc. (p.2)
Is this a joke? Yes. But it's sufi humor: in his own study of linguistics and neuroscience, coupled with Niels Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics, AKA the Copenhagen Interpretation, which seems to imply we are always at one remove from "objective reality" (whatever that is!), RAW thought that Bohr thought our descriptions of the quantum world were merely our best stab at a formal, mathematical description of "reality" at that level, and not a description of the one true, rock-bottom "reality." It was the best our nervous systems could do. (And, with the quantum theory, that's been good enough: it's easily the most successful scientific theory we have yet, and all of our fancy electronic gadgets have quantum-based equations built into them. Isn't all this...weird? Almost...ineffable?)
By applying the prefix "neuro- " to all our disciplines, we are reminding ourselves that we are particular embodied, biological beings on a planet with an atmosphere, that we have a certain bilateral symmetry and walk upright with opposable thumbs, seem programmed to live 75-100 years, breath a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and a few other atoms, make tools, orbit a Type G star in a nondescript galaxy, seem governed mostly by emotions, make love and war with stunning aplomb, etc...who have limitations and are prone to premature certainties and, at times, howlingly bad interpretations. Look at the short history of Modern Science: much in the way of earnest but quite inadequate interpretation. There seems very little reason to assume we have crawled out of this cave of contingency.
I surmise that RAW would've called the current attempts to investigate neurotheology as "neuroneurotheology." Which I'm fine with, but will resort to the simpler "neurotheology" in order to save on bandwidth.
Then I guess the corollary to this would be that anything normally considered "theology" - like studying theodicy - would be the "neurotheology," so maybe when I'm talking about neuroneurotheology - religious experiences as solely brain-phenomena - maybe that really "is" more accurate? Oh, we'll know just by context, right?
The Dogmatic scientific materialist Eye-Roll set to go at three...two...one...aaaaand: ACTION!
O! Sing to me, Gods and Goddesses of sex, ecstasy, enlightened hedonism and equanimity! Breathe into me some...god-stuff! Only via the auspices of the Goddess of Cosmic Laughter can I see these Things through, which, aye, like all things and kidney stones, shall pass in the fullness of Space/Time. And if you're gonna go on being a bitch, I guess I'll just have to wait. Sheesh! Goddesses can be so temperamental!
Aye, but still: Sing to me?
Erin C. Perry's image of Aphrodite. I think I saw that outfit when I browsed Naughty Lingerie one day. What does it say about our paideuma that we in the West have no female love goddess that competes for the attentions of Yahweh? (Or do we?)
Origins of Religion: Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
In his Autobiography (one of the first true modern ones), Vico writes of his Newtonian breakthroughs in what today we'd call the "social sciences":
"He discovers new historical principles of philosophy, and first of all a metaphysics of the human race. That is to say, a natural theology of all nations by which each people naturally created by itself its own gods through a certain natural instinct that man has for divinity. Fear of these gods led the first founders of nations to unite themselves with certain women in a lifelong companionship. This was the first human form of marriage. Thus he discovers the identity of the grand principle of gentile theology with that of the poetry of the theological poets, who were the world's first poets of all gentile humanity." (167-168)
A "natural instinct that man has for divinity." We will soon see that this is still a hotly contested topic in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science.
Okay, also note that Vico brackets off the Jews, who he considered to be the one tribe truly under a special dispensation from Gee Oh Dee. Over the years, in my reading of Vico, I think this is just a convenient way to seem like a Bible believer: he thought he'd perhaps score points with the Inquisition everywhere. But if you read Vico - just check out the Autobiography - you see he was influenced by Lucretius, whose hero was Epicurus. This is a stark fact that I find hard to square with most scholars' reading of Vico, and certainly a NeoCon like Mark Lilla doesn't see it this way. (But of course!) Vico knew of the persecution of heretics. Some of them had been his friends. Bracketing off the Jews made his sly act of writing as if he was a devout Roman Catholic, while a deeper and more nuanced reading shows him to be the first modern Anthropologist, and perhaps the inventor of the sociology of knowledge, which shows that people will tend to have certain political and other ideas based on the time, place, and social stratus in which they were born and raised and educated, and that what people believe is knowledge anywhere and anytime should be taken seriously, however much most other scholars would scoff. That which we do not consider "rational" can, when studied closely, reveal much about humankind. (And possibly suggest ways to avert socio-political dead ends?)
At present, I surmise that Vico's bracketing of the Jews was a move that made his work simpler: he had even bigger fish to fry; accounting for the Jews in his grand schema would only create more work for him. Hence: why not grant them their special one-to-one relationship with the Big Guy, and concentrate on more interesting things? Like how class warfare is always being fought by the Owners against the Workers?
Here's a vision of Zeus, a thunder-sky-father god. Note how important it usually is for Angry Daddy to be ripped. Zeus here is so godly he seems to have an 8-pack, and he's ready to run for Mr. Olympia yet again. And who would DARE vote against him? (Pssst: word on the street is this dude was into bestiality, which I can neither confirm, nor is it up to mortal me to deny.)
For Vico, "gods" first spoke through us as we began to try to interpret the entrails of animals and other acts of "divination;" very slowly we began to think in metaphors. Then most of language was based in metaphors, and we had learned to mostly think in language-constructs, or metaphors. The metaphor, in some sense, was a hypnotizing symbol for Objective Reality, but words can only be signs at the most...And language has always been used as Class Warfare by the landowners and the rich and the aristocratic, against everyone else. Vico argues that there's always been a dialectic: the intermarried Owners versus Everyone Else. The proles eventually gain more and more rights, things become more and more secular...then the local civilization, anywhere in History, falls apart, and then the Whole Thing starts up again. It's an idea - the cyclical model of history - that had been used before (Vico was influenced by people like Varro here), and it's been used again, most notoriously by James Joyce. It seems a poetic conception foremost to me, and in the case of Vico, it also provided a bulwark against persecution: he's really some stupendously weirdo thinker who's still totally brilliant. The Authorities probably didn't know what to make of him. He got away with it. (But he paid for it too: his grand masterwerk was neglected while he lived - though he worked the "social media" of 1725-1740 Naples/Europe as best he could - and it drove him over the edge, and he died soon after.)
Gods and goddesses in every country, every religion, came out of the sky and ground (metaphorically) and spoke to humans in poetic ways, via the first poets, who, funny enough, spoke in terms of Laws in such a way that seemed to favor the Landlords overwhelmingly. At one point in his magnum opus The New Science, he says that, initially, the Law was a "severe form of poetry."
Those who follow the latest neurobiological ideas about how language is instantiated in neural clusters in our brains, which we picked up via experience and repeated hearings, will find in Vico an 18th century Neapolitan weirdo-genius (my favorite types!) who prefigured it all. George Lakoff acknowledges as much in his The Political Mind when he writes, "A few philosophers (such as Vico, Nietzsche, and Cassirer) and literary critics (such as I.A. Richards) had noticed the existence of metaphorical thought, but none had figured out the scientific details of how it works." (252) Nietzsche was born in 1844, Cassirer in 1874, and Richards in 1893. Vico, again, was born in 1668.
So: the origin of gods and goddesses come from, first: the Ruling Classes, then the Workers have divinities speak through them. The local gods - especially the thunder/bird of prey/vengeful/Father God - will sometimes be used by the Ruling Classes as a political form of crowd control, but the Workers will come back with their own gods. (There's really an hellaciously lot of more from Vico, but no one likes it when I go on too long...)
Let us consider this a First Model for thinking about Neurotheology, based upon one Overweening Generalist's readings of the staggeringly brilliant and at times maddeningly opaque Vico.
If The Reader has a favorite origin model for religion, I wouldn't mind hearin' it.
The OG is a "mystical agnostic"? Yep. Or at least that's my answer these days when someone asks me about my religion (which, truth be told, hardly ever happens these days; my apparent agnostic hedonistic heathen rep tends to precede me); I like a line from Professor Carlin: "I'm not an atheist and I'm not an agnostic. I'm an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me." (found in Sullivan's excellent book on Professor Carlin, 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, pp.221-222)
In the thirty or so-odd years I've been reading the Holy Books, the interpretations of such, studying various branches of what Robert Anton Wilson called "atheology," delving joyously in meta-satirical religions like the Church of the Subgenius and the Discordian Society (I can't get enough of that Old Time Irreverence, often invoking a Gee Oh Dee I don't believe in), reading evolutionary psychological views on religion, on and on...I remain a happy sorta-atheist/agnostic who's pagan-gnostic-ish "spiritual," and who sees the gods and goddesses of all religions and myths as METAPHORS for internal human states.
If The Reader wants to know largely where I'm coming from in these matters, I heartily recommend reading an essay by Robert Sapolsky titled "Circling The Blankets For God," collected in his book The Trouble With Testosterone. (If you have the time, here's 80 minutes of Sapolsky lecturing at Stanford on the neurobiological basis for a lot of weirdness in religious practice.)
I'm also (obvious to many of you) heavily influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's various nuanced takes on religion; radical intellectuals and artists who were brought up in the Catholic faith seem to attract me strongly and I don't yet have it nailed why, for I was not brought up in any faith and remain a default happy pagan of some sort. Buckminster Fuller once told RAW in an interview that "'God' seems like a rather small concept to contain the exquisitely interaccomodative coherencies of universe," and I also resonate with that.
(Others who have greatly influenced my thinking on religion: Aleister Crowley, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, Joseph Campbell, Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu, Rumi, Timothy Leary, Elaine Pagels, Ezra Pound...)
So why am I interested in Christianity and other established and organized religions? Because so many of my brothers and sisters on this planet take this stuff VERY seriously. As the theologian Harvey Cox (who I admire) often says, there are people who will die for the faith and there are people who will kill for the faith. I'm necessarily interconnected with all of you; what you - in the widest possible sense of "you" - think and feel and believe about your religion fascinates me (often in a somber way). In the end, because organized religion is such a Big Deal I must, almost by definition, as an overweening generalist, be interested. And so: on with it...
The "Emergent Church"
I have a brother who has a degree in Theology, and he's turned me on to this term. He's thrown names and book titles and ideas from this movement at me, and I've been trying to keep up. As someone who thinks Falwell/Robertson-level xtianity is a plague on the Unistatian body-politic, the emergent church is something to be happy about. As I read some of the authors my dear brother tells me about, I find an assumed language (less so with people like Harvey Cox and Peter Berger and Philip Jenkins, not that they're hard-core denizens of the emergent church, but my brother has spoken highly of them as theological writers, or more accurately, sociologists of Christianity and other religions) that strongly suggests I (pagan) am not thought of when the books were written; that is, when I read Marcus Borg, Tim Keel, and Brian McLaren (this last my brother's favorite, along with Erwin McManus...my biggest clue that the emergent people are on to something good: the mainstream moronic Christians are feeling heavily persecuted by these relatively small postmodern religious thinkers; Google "emergent church" and see how scary it is to the mainstream. Here's one about McManus), I realize how much is assumed by these writers towards their assumed readers: fairly radical Christians who have sussed and ruminated far far more on the meaning of scripture and the history of scriptural hermeneutics than I would ever be expected to, as an Outsider. And it really feels like I'm not..."in the club." And often, I don't read these books all the way through. They're too geeky and for Insiders. Perhaps this will progress so that these writers will realize there are people like me trying to understand the programs better, but I suspect, given what they're up against, that these guys have more pressing issues. The funniest of these emergent guys - that I've seen, so far - is Dan Kimball. If this is the future of Christianity, then we non-Christians have something to look forward to, I must say. "God" "bless" them!
Montaigne on Prophecy
In Book I of his Essays, there's one called "Of Prognostications." It's instructive that Montaigne could write about prophecy in such a Skeptical Enquirer-ish manner in 16th c. Catholic France, but we must notice that every time he makes fun of prophecy, it's pagan-based stuff. He notes people who rave on about how their almanac turned out to be right about some such thing, their readers somehow not noticing all the instances in which it was wrong. This selective attention, this oh-too-human psychological bias is well known to us today. (Jeez, just read Daniel Kahneman's astonishingly erudite new book, Thinking Fast and Slow!)
Montaigne tells us of Diogenes the Atheist, who saw a painting of the survivors of a disastrous shipwreck, and a Believer chastised him saying, "Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you say to so many preserved from death by their especial favour?" To which Diogenes - one of the guys on my team - responds, "Why...that their pictures are not here who were cast away, who are by much the greater number." Montaigne in that same essay talks of Joachim the Calabrian abbot, "who foretold all the future Popes," and the Emperor Leo, "who prophesied all the emperors and patriarchs of Greece." This stuff cracks up Montaigne; he reminds me of Aldous Huxley who, when he moved to Hollywood to get away from warring Europe, ironically consulted astrologers and palm-readers, trying to keep a straight face. Montaigne's take on astrologers and diviners who seem to have some sort of unworldly power is, in my Cotton translation, worth repeating. He's ultra-modern here and would probably laff himself silly at the latest Pat Robertson schtick of "God Told Me To Tell You" chicanery:
This I have been an eyewitness of, that in public confusions, men astonished at their fortune, have abandoned their own reason, superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes and menaces of their present mishaps, and in my time have been so strangely successful in it, as to make me believe that this being an amusement of sharp and volatile wits, those who have been versed in the knack of unfolding and untying riddles, are capable, in any sort of writing, to find out what they desire. But above all, that which gives them the greatest room to play in, is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic gibberish of their prophetic canting, where their authors deliver nothing of clear sense, but shroud all in riddle, to the end that posterity may interpret and apply it according to its own fancy.
Nostradamus, anyone?
Why Stick With It?
When prophecy fails - which is a famous sociological book, highly recommended - why do people stick it out? How do they explain the failure of the inerrant? To go back to sociology, there's tremendous cognitive dissonance. I've been mouthing off about this stuff, I've invested emotional energy in this all coming to pass, and now it doesn't. Someone heard the the voices in their head and mistook them, or the devil made 'em do it. Or someone is a weak shaman/prophet/wiz and forgot to carry the two or they read the entrails wrongly. Or, the leaders have done something abhorrent. (Think: Catholic priests and child abuse, for example.) Do I gather my wits, cut my losses and convert to Scientology or just join the Marines? Do I become a Rationalist? What?
No, we know that people do not (usually) do any of those things when the system - religious or not - that they have vested interests in being "right," fails them. A recent study suggests that "system justification" is at work. The more you have invested, emotionally and otherwise, and the more enmeshed you feel within the system, the more you must adapt and see the system for what it still can be. To outsiders, the system you're in is corrupt, inept, unjust, evil, stupid. The insider adapts, excuses the latest crime by the leaders as a rather small thing, and figures this is yet another test of faith and fidelity.
This seems to apply to political thought and other Belief Systems (which I will abrev. as BS, after David Jay Brown) as well. This seems like a worthy study to keep in mind for those who are active for progressive change. One thing the article doesn't address is that a small minority do quit, and militate against the system they formerly adhered to. I see this as a rare form of courage, and quietly applaud anyone who's jumped outside of the system in order to make Things better.
Now, because my sponsor has been so supportive, here's another commercial from the good people at Grady's Oats:
God's Approval Rating
As of last July, God's approval rating was at a dismal 52%. Or at least that's according to this report on a poll. It's certainly much higher than Congress's approval rating, which, last I saw, was around 7%. So when we look at it that way, God is kicking Congress's ass (or is it asses?). If it was a prizefight, the refs would stop it: too much blood all over Congress. (I've heard God has a good right arm jab, but an even better left hand uppercut.) I have no data on how well God is doing now, just after Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and other solstice-hovering "holy" days. Maybe if the economy improves, God can push it to 60% by Easter, and his Kid can take it from there.
(One really has to make a Miracle work to challenge "oral sex," which consistently polls at around 98%, worldwide, and that's only for the givers!)
The question is: how can God work his image? I know some PR firms that are pretty damned audacious and mendacious at getting you to believe that the sky is not blue, but really: a fuschia with Peter Max stripes. Or that raising taxes on billionaires will further wreck the economy. Or that global warming, even if "real" and man-made, is a good thing. Or that Newt Gingrich would make Unistat great again. But are they up to taking on God as a client? How would you make God look a lot better to Joe and Josephine Q. Sixpack? Because, personally, I don't know. I'm with Woody Allen, who thinks God has failed miserably, and wonders why everyone doesn't get together to file a class-action lawsuit against Him.
All right, once again I've typed far too much. I apologize for wasting your time, fellow non-believers and the one or two Believers who might read this blog. Shalom! (Or is it Aloha?)
Here's Harvey Cox, for my dough one of the best of the sane theologians. It's 10 minutes:
