Thoughts and Questions on Being Human

Our Precocious and Problematic Minds: Part 1

 

God                          (Eroico, andante moderato) 

Before I move into this still somewhat sensitive subject, I would like to go back several sessions, to when I described the human body as “a sack of soft tissues and water, with a calcified skeletal interior framework and copious numbers of filaments and conduits, with other kinds of fluids, and nerve signals, in motion or action at all times, taking in, shall we say trillions?, of stimuli from its internal and external environments.”

 For this combination of ingredients to have developed the capacity to encapsulate stimuli and networks of synapses into the kernels of compact and extended meanings and significations that they have for us in the form of words, concepts, and ideas was, literally, “something new under the sun”. 

It is so second-nature to us, however, that we very easily lose sight of the fact that these words and concepts and ideas are, first of all, our products, that is, they are human products, and, secondly, that they are the specific products of our physical brains (it is the process of producing those products, and becoming aware of them, that may well constitute the transition from brain to mind).

 “God” is one of those products of the human brain/mind. While perhaps originally the outgrowth of the personification of the forces, or the vital energy, that could be felt or sensed throughout what we now label as Nature, this has largely been abstracted into the meanings and associations that we are familiar with today.  

As an abstraction or a concept, or a story character, "God" exists just as any other story character, any mythological being, or any idea or abstract concept, “exists” for us.  Even though these may not represent “proper” things (to use a proper English expression) that actually physically exist outside of our minds, such concepts of ideas can, as we well know, nevertheless have very real consequences in how we relate to them, in how we use them, and how we relate to each other about them.  In that sense, “God” is as real, as, for example, the character of Pierre in War and Peace.

      (I appreciate that many of our words do in fact stand for “things” that exist outside of us, and have an existence independent of us [unless we made them, of course], but I will only quibble here that in those cases, the words in question are names more than they are ideas or concepts or story characters, although, as I suggested above, we do often imbue them with forces and powers, in effect personifying them, and thus also making them into story characters.)

The concept or the character of “God”, too, is one that different people relate to in very different ways.  One particular difference that is problematic for us is that there is a natural tendency for some, perhaps most of us, at some time or another, to take the character or the concept as a name of something that actually exists out there in the world in the same kind of way that rocks and lizards exist.  Other people, we know, do not take it that way, and therein lies a potent source, or fount, of some of the most troublesome problems that have been witnessed over the millennia.  These seem unlikely to go away any time soon. 

 “But…”

“But,” a believer might ask, “how can you ever be certain that God is only a story character, or an idea, or a concept?  Is it not possible that God represents something that we humans, or at least the very great majority of us, are not constituted to perceive and recognize [perhaps like dark matter, or dark energy?]?”

 Actually, given the way that our minds function, we might not be able to prove beyond any doubt that such a proposition has no merit.  We can, however, provide simple observations and arguments that might help put it in perspective.  

1.  The huge preponderance of factual knowledge and understanding that we humans have gained fits well within a cause and effect understanding of our existence and the universe, and of their stepwise evolution from the smallest “particles” to life and galaxies as we know them. 

     To turn one’s back on all of that knowledge, and in effect pin one’s hopes on a conceptual possibility of a possibility (our chance of winning the lottery, given that we have bought a legal ticket, is an actual possibility, albeit a very slender one, but not being able to definitively close the door on a hypothesized situation does not confer any actual possibility of that situation occurring, only that the conceiving of its possibility cannot be ruled out), possibly born of “wouldn’t it be nice if” thinking, is, if one is charitable about it (which we really should be, in most cases), to be still thinking as children think; those who are not so charitable might declare that it is quite out of touch with reality, and go on to question their sanity. 

      One safe way out for believers would be to simply acknowledge that claims and beliefs do not constitute evidence that can be used to argue their case, nor confer actual possibility, and let that issue lie, but privately maintain a belief that, in the end, all will become clear. 

 2.  Even if there could be a disembodied being that otherwise has a mind (and don’t forget that our minds are a function of our having the physical brains that we have) and could somehow insinuate itself into the cause-and-effect nature of our existence, it would be so categorically different from any being that humans have ever had manifest cognizance of, or a relationships with, that there would seem to be no way for these two types of beings to interact with each other. 

      We can perhaps see no better evidence of that failure of interaction than to remind ourselves of just how much mayhem has been caused by the simple matter of our not being able to reach agreement among ourselves about the nature of that other kind of being, and what, if anything, it expects or demands from us (or, perhaps more to the point, which of us it gives preference to).  Given that disruption and mayhem, if it did exist, it would be better for us if it did not: we would be much better off going about the business that we know about, which is living our lives as we experience them.

3. There are giveaway clues that we are dealing with a story character, and not something as real as rocks and lizards – for example, gender: what possible need could a disembodied being that is one-of-a-kind (so it is said), have for gender?  As we understand gender, that would imply that at some time, there were at least two predecessors of this being (and how many more before them, one would wonder), and that there would also presumably be a complementary counterpart that “God” could join with to produce offspring.  Or, if there were only one such being, and if it were immaterial, how and why would it be jealous of what other “gods” this paltry cause-and-effect being called a Human might believe in?

 

However, it seems to me that for most of us who seem to believe, or at least say that they believe, in the actual existence of God, this specific belief is not itself as important as the attributes and powers that God is supposed (pronounced suPOSED) to have.  These are given the potency they need by being associated with an actual being, in spite of the arguments against that possibility. 

 

The power of “God”

Be all of that as it may, no matter what we believe to be or not be the case about “God”, there can be no denying, judging by the things that are done “in God’s name”, that it is a very powerful concept, perhaps one of the most potent concepts that we humans have conceived. 

As a human product, and as touching the very core of what we experience and wonder about—and fear—as living beings that happen to be conscious (too conscious or aware for our own good, some would say), what we put into this concept of “God” and what we get out of it and do with it, reveals a great deal about us.

What would be the human needs and desires that it fulfills and manifests? 

[z]  There is, of course, the awe that many of us feel about the enormity and the manifest beauty (setting aside for the moment that it is our minds that create that sense of beauty) of what we often experience around us. 

 [z]   Going back to the discussion of several weeks ago, about the sheer number and the fluidity of interactions that we, as complex living beings, have with our ever-changing environments, and captured in the phrase “dynamic immediacy”, one might say, poetically, at least, that we are, for most of our lives, in what might be called a veritable storm of stimuli and motives and emotions.  Different ones of us, through no fault of our own, are differentially prepared to deal with this “storm”.

        One very important power of the concept of “God” as we have developed it, appears to be to help us weather this storm of life.  A very good example of this is that of Saint Augustine, who wrote, in his Confessions:

       "Yet they [men] strive to comprehend things eternal, whilst their hearts fluttered between the motions of things past and to come, and is still unstable.  Who should hold it, and fix it, that it be settled a while. …. Who should hold the heart of man, that it may stand still…"[1]

        For Saint Augustine, then, “God” was the calm, or the calming force, in the storm of Being. 

[z]  In a similar light, “God” is also a potent creation for helping us subordinate our unruly desires and actions, of representing our submission to something larger and more stable than ourselves. This is by no means a trivial matter. Unfortunately, our history with this aspect of the concept of “God” shows us that what many of the self-selected representatives or adherents of this concept of “God” most want is to use the concept as a means for initiating others into submission to them, or to a group of people like themselves.  

[z]  In our minds’ “original” states, before experience and education and shaping, they are very self-centered and narcissistic. (How could it be otherwise?) For many of us, this does not change all that much during the courses of our lives, and “God” comes to represent all of the greatness and power that we, the mortal and limited beings that we are, want to be (or think we are) or to have; we identify with this larger being, one that fills us out to what we feel we want to be or should be.  In our minds, we become “God”.  When we stand and sing the words “How great thou art, how great thou art,” how many of us are not really singing that hymn to ourselves? 

        One of the very potent attributes of “God”, then, is as this larger identity, this larger source of will and power, that we can call forth.  (The derivation of the English word “god”, in fact, is from an original sense of being “possessed” by some force or being.)  The everyday question that arises is how those who invoke this potency of identifying (or actually embodying) the qualities of “God”, relate to the rest of us—is it still as someone who is here on the same terms as other people, or as obvious superiors?  (How many of us have not worked for someone who “thought they were God”, and acted accordingly?)

        It is one thing to call on an inner force that we capture by the word “God”, and quite another to then treat everyone else as obvious inferiors, or, perhaps worse, as insignificant, or as not human at all.

[z]   Related to the above is the fear that we often experience in life, perhaps first personified by a punishing or commanding father or father figure, associated with people who obviously were stronger and more willful than we were, and there was no question but that this was an unchangeable reality. In these circumstances, “God” may not represent who or what we want to be like, or to be, but, rather, represents that powerful, yet (possibly) benevolent being that can protect us, that we can look to for peace and comfort, and who we are on a personal, if not first-name, basis with.  In this otherwise impersonal world, we are at least special for some being or force, and maybe it will protect us, “smite” our enemies, or “cut us a break”. 

        Here, too, the further question is how we then treat others around us: do we treat them as if they are still basically the same as we are, or, perhaps because they do not use the words or practice the rituals that we do, do we treat them with disdain, or indifference, or even hatred, for not being “saved”, or “chosen”, as we obviously are? 

[z]  “God” can also represent, or yield a vision of a hideaway, a sequestered, peaceful garden of our own, perhaps to be shared with one or a few select people, doing what comes naturally.

 

All of this does say a lot about us.  As far as what we do with the concept of “God” is concerned, and whether this has more good or more bad effects, my judgment is that at a “local” level, at the level of the individual or small groups of people who have actually come to believe what they believe (as opposed to having been brought up being told what to believe, but even there, to some degree), the positive effects might well outweigh the harmful ones. 

However, at levels higher than small more or less “organic” or closely-knit groups, there is no doubt in my mind that history clearly reveals that there have been far more harmful than beneficial effects over our history.  This is yet another example, it would seem, of our having outgrown the conditions that most of our evolution took place in, but we are still groping for concepts to help us make sense of the scale of things that we now live in.  At this scale, “God” might be seen as an anachronism, but since it fulfills so many functions and needs, it would be hard to replace.

Some positive aspects

For many, it would appear, “God” is the putting of a familiar, and generally (but not always) beneficent face on the sometimes frightening array of events going on around them, and which are out of their direct control.  For probably not a small number of these believers, their belief allows them to go forward in the face of all that fear and uncertainty, instead of hiding away from it by various means.  This is what I would see as an example of a “local” benefit.

There are, in addition, some other-regarding aspects of “God” that could make it very positively powerful today, not the least of which being captured by the expression “We are all God’s children”, by which we would appear to be calling for more acceptance and goodwill towards the other people who we share this earth with.  However, I do not need to tell you how seldom or to what a limited extent this really works—but I would ask you to search your knowledge and imagination and ask yourself what the world would be like without this weak-sounding homily or metaphor.  Is there anything that has as much force in this direction?  [Music, perhaps?]

I also believe that there is some real and positive power in the expression “So help me God”, particularly when it is used to invoke what we consider to be our highest and most selfless aspirations for how we would like to comport ourselves in difficult, or public, situations (obviously, this does not necessarily apply to all of the Congress of the United States,  but that, at least, can change).

In Summation

“God” is a very real, and very powerful, human concept, combining in one word our potent fears, our desires to understand everything, and for orderliness and control, awe, and our untutored narcissism and egos, and one that history shows to have generally had far more negative than positive effects at other than the “local” level. That, however, is not the fault of the concept, which is, as has been noted, a human concept, but the fault of those who hold the concept most dear, or use it for other purposes. 

When we talk about “God”, are we not perhaps also talking about Ego, and are the positive powers that reside in the concept not simply the result of our educating and controlling our egos?

Questions

In the course of writing the above, I posed a number of questions, which, admittedly, may have appeared to have been rhetorical in nature. 

However, they were not.  I would really like to hear the answers that some of you might give or suggest to those questions.

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[1] The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Chatto & Windus edition, 1921; translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.  See http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/tcosa10.txt for full text.

 

Introduction and Allegro - Conclusion. Tempo comodo; animato; sostenuto

(Possibly) Optimistic Thoughts on Optimism and Pessimism

In starting this blog, I had a train of thought in mind, and had already drafted what I thought was going to be the second entry (on some of the invisibles that we have a hard time seeing) before I even posted the Introduction.  But, as Robert Burns reminded us about “best laid plans”, I awoke the next morning with the realization that there was a postscript or a conclusion to the Introduction clamoring to come out, that to some extent I had written what psychologists call a “projective” test, one that stimulates the projection of un-articulated, even hidden, feelings by whoever is taking the test, and I would like here to address two of those possible feelings, specifically those of  optimism and pessimism. 

Is Ralph Gaines’ quote optimistic, and is William Carlos Williams’s pessimistic – or the reverse?  That is pretty much up to you to decide, but I think that I need to explore those two perspectives before we move on.

I have sometimes heard, or read, that someone had reason to be optimistic, or to be pessimistic, almost as if they might be able to consciously decide which to be, based on a careful assessment of the situation at hand.  I am not sure about that, at all.  To me, someone might be “hopeful” or, perhaps, “doubtful”,  but it also seems to me that most of the time, when we use the words “pessimistic” and “optimistic”, we are referring to more deep-seated, more subconscious and core tendencies, about how a given person feels about things.  In other words, they are not so much out in the universe to be discovered, but are in our minds, in our personalities, and are therefore personal and individual.     

When we get into that territory, however, we become involved in different perceptions and expectations, actual or subliminal feelings of happiness, and other personal tendencies (there are many ways of being in the word, all of them only partial expressions of what we might consider to be “human”), any one of which might appear, to others, at least, to be inconsistent with reality.  But is there no sense to be made here, some basis for people to share thoughts and perspectives?

Julian L. Ross explored this issue at some length in his excellent little 1949 book, Philosophy in Literature.  He points out that the difference between “optimism” and “pessimism” is not the same as the difference between happiness and unhappiness, nor is it the same as the difference between self-satisfaction [his term – I believe most people now simply say “satisfaction”] and discontent. 

As for the first declaration, he writes (p.188) that “the paradoxical nature of the problem appears in the fact that an optimist is frequently sad, while a pessimist may thoroughly enjoy life,” which is explainable, he says, by the inevitable discrepancies between what our expectations about life are and what we actually receive [or, and this is my aside, what we think we are receiving, or what we are due].  Happiness is an emotional matter.  And as far as our expectations are concerned, I believe that I can safely assume that almost all of us are familiar with how “out of joint” our own expectations can be with reality.  

Ross proceeds from that opening discussion to write that a philosophical discussion of pessimism and optimism needs to be rather more inclusive, taking, at its greatest extent, the universe as a whole, and that what that means for this discussion is whether the structure of the universe, such as it is, and such as we have to accept as it is, allows for more good, actual and potential, for the human race, or more bad.  An optimist, he says, would conclude in favor of the first, and a pessimist, the second.

But that is not the end of the discussion, for he next points out although we pretty much have to accept the universe as we find it, whether we feel that what is there is “good” or “bad” are, in my words, human value judgments, not facts, and are therefore not absolute judgments, but need some standard, or reference point.  “[F]or a human thinker,” he then continues, “that standard must be the development of human personality,” and we therefore have to use such values as intelligence, love, beauty, and justice, as our standards in making our judgments.  His final definition of the terms (p. 190), then, is that if “we conclude that there is in reality the possibility that human values can maintain and develop themselves, we are optimists; if not, we are pessimists.”  In other words, if we are doing more than marking time while we are here, if we feel that we can be here for a realizable reason or reasons while we are alive, then we are optimists, and if we feel that we can’t, or that it doesn’t make a difference whether we do or not, then we are pessimists.

Questions

Do you feel that Julian Ross’s discussion of pessimism and optimism had merit?  Did it at least stimulate your own thinking?  Do you think that his thoughts have relevance today?

Are you a pessimist or an optimist, and why do you think so?

 Half-empty, half-full

After that somewhat serious discussion, I think that a little respite is in order.  In his early discussion of this topic, Ross makes reference to the old saw about pessimists as seeing a glass with water at the midpoint as being half-empty, while an optimist sees it is half-full.  My rejoinder is that the half-empty – half-full paradigm is not about pessimism and optimism at all, but about newness, and everything that comes with that.  Moreover, I believe that one could make the argument that if it were about pessimism and optimism, we might even argue for the reverse interpretation—in other words, that someone who sees a glass as half empty is in reality more optimistic, and that someone who sees it as half full is being pessimistic. 

And here is that argument: If someone says that a glass is half-empty, then it is not outlandish to conclude that there was once, perhaps very recently, more water in the glass, even perhaps that it was full to start with.  And if it was full to start with, it is not such a stretch to conclude that there is more water where that water came from.  If, on the other hand, someone says that the glass is half-full, the not outlandish implication that might be inferred is that that is all the water there was to start with, and even, perhaps, that there is no more where that came from.  Which one of these would you say is more “optimistic”, and which more “pessimistic”?

Deeply pondering this most important of questions for many hours (I dare to admit), it seems to me that it is our incessant longing for all of the latent and inherent possibilities that come, almost as a form of ontology, as part of our always-reaching being, with new situations: a “half-full” glass represents a situation with all of those latent and inherent possibilities intact, still open to be explored, whereas a “half-empty” glass has already been tasted from, and that makes a serious dent, in our psyches, in the store of possibilities that had been there just before we took those first sips; that is likely the same mechanism at work when a new car loses one-third of its value as soon as it is driven off the showroom floor.  (And it may or may not be related to the importance of virginity at marriage for women in many traditional cultures.) 

When we feel nostalgic about a situation or place in our past, it is not, I feel, solely about the specific events that took place, or the specific feelings we remember having at the time, but also includes all of the possibilities that we sensed were pregnant in the situation, many even looked forward to with eager, not to say giddy, anticipation, but which were never, the mean part of reality, actualized, never even realizable.  It doesn’t matter that they weren’t realistically realizable; what matters is that they weren’t realized, and that too, I feel, is part of our feelings of nostalgia.  

Taking the realities of human life as we know that it has evolved, including, in particular, the existence of pain, of pleasures, of loss and death, of some level of social life, of rest, of tedium, and of laughter, and anguish, and of joy, I would have to say that at least on the level of my individual life, that I am an optimist, using Ross’s definition.  I definitely have the biological and mental capacity to have some pleasures in life, even in very tough circumstances, and as long as my mind and my sense of the basic equality of others are reasonably intact, I can always grow, and I can do something to help someone else.  I may not have gotten what I had wanted out of life, but that is another matter altogether, a matter of my preconceptions about what life had “promised”, or what was actually possible; as far as I can see now, with a few years of hindsight, it only promised, only was able to promise, the things I itemized at the beginning of this paragraph.  Hence (and I did not realize this at the time that I did it) the inclusion of the Ralph Gaines quote - if I can be more aware of what is there and what is possible, then I definitely will be better able to do some things that I would at an earlier time have considered impossible.  Maybe I’m just talking about growth, but still…

Having said that, I would also have to admit that as far as whether I am an optimist about what we humans collectively can do about our present and future, I am not so sure about that.  As individuals, we may have been “granted” all the capacities that I itemized above, but what we have been endowed with by biology and evolution as far as living together and preparing for the future are concerned, these are much less clearly well-developed.  For one thing, our large-scale population centers, and our extraordinary technical skills have developed since we developed conscious minds, which greatly altered the way that evolution works with us; the social skills that we were endowed with would seem to be pretty rudimentary, and as far as our time horizons are concerned, we are still primarily living in the biological time frame where the criterion is whether we survive long enough to send forth another generation and to take care of it only as long as it takes for it to fend for itself and stay alive, and that time frame is oriented basically around getting through each day to get to the night, to get to the next day, with a minor time scaling of eating and drinking, and a somewhat weaker longer-term scaling of seasons.   

These would seem to not give us many tools for dealing with social and technological complexity, getting along with more distant—and often very different—peoples, or thinking very long term, other than a predisposition to keep on doing the same things that we have been doing, and hope for the best.  Here, it would seem that pessimism and optimism don’t have so much to do with our belief that the structure of the universe itself does or does not allow for the fulfillment and maintenance of our values, but on whether our own capacities as conscious beings, with our own levels of awareness and commitment to values of our own choosing, will or will not provide a continuing basis for that.  On these grounds, I cannot say nearly as definitely that I am an optimist here. 

However, on the basis of occasional rays of hope alone, neither am I prepared to say that I am a pessimist.  This is an area that we ourselves will have to develop our own tools and capacities in, including, as I think William Carlos Williams was trying to tell us, moderating our desires.  I also remind myself that we weren’t promised anything in this regard; biology and evolution only inform us that other things being equal, and as long as the environment and the environmental forces remain reasonably constant, we should be able to continue populating the earth. That’s all we have been promised, if that.  What evolution does not provide for is any other than very gross (not refined) braking mechanisms for over-grazing (of resources in general) or overpopulation.   How much refinement we put into the braking mechanisms, and how we are able to maintain human values in the process, is up to us.  I do feel that we at least have the capacity to think about this, and if we think about it enough, we can change some minds.

 

**  I do not know when William Carlos Williams wrote the lines referred to in the Introduction, but he died in 1963.  Five years after that, in 1968, a group of concerned professionals first met in Rome to discuss their concerns over our future; from that meeting grew The Club of Rome, which published its influential “The Limits to Growth” in 1972.  Almost 40 years ago.  Their website states: “unlimited consumption and growth on a planet with limited resources cannot go on forever and is indeed dangerous,” and they are very much in the business of thinking globally, acting locally,' as one expression used to put it.  

    Their website is at:  http://www.clubofrome.org/eng/home/

Another website that is action-oriented is that of dotearth: http://dotearth.blogs-nytimes.com. 

Also, the journal Psychology Today has a site relating specifically to human interactions with nature:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/human-nature.