Meaningless or meaningful: the choice is yours

The astute observer may have noticed, and the wary reader may have suspected, that the last of couple of blog threads were rather oddly intertwined. I say oddly merely because these themes are not often brought into close proximity with each other. Science, religion, a Christian holiday, paradox, politics and business are not often thought about together. We moderns -- especially the more rationally inclined among us -- love to separate, classify, keep apart and compartmentalize. (And if you can believe Bob Altemeyer, which I do, it would seem the authoritarian-minded amongst us are better at this than everyone else. Go figure. But that's another post for another day.) I'm convinced that's one of the reasons I have so much trouble getting anyone to pay attention or listen to what I'm saying: I'm often confusing the issue with the facts, or I'm talking about the other side of a given coin, or ... well, whatever.

Personally, I don't care if you're a hard-over materialist, militant atheist, fundamentalist or evangelical Christian, or simply a go-with-the-crowd-because-if-I-don't-show-up-for-church-on-Sunday-I-won't-have-any-friends believer. Really, it doesn't matter (or, as they used to phrase it where I grew up: it don't make me no nevermind). What you say you believe means very little to me. I'm an action-speaks-louder-than-words type, and what you do (including what you post on Facebook or other social media, whether you participate in demonstrations or boycotts, how you vote or the number of actual notches in your six-gun tell me most of what I need to know.

Yes, the world is full of theories, but we have developed good, sound, reliable, processes and rules for deciding which ones are the ones worth considering. Some call it the scientific method, some call it good-old common sense ... it doesn't matter. In the end, at bottom, when all is said and done, most things simply make sense, or they don't. Lord knows there are lots of people who can live without it, apparently, but I don't happen to be one of them.

There is a difference between whether something makes sense (generally) or whether something makes sense (to me .. and those who think like me). Take Easter, for example: there are those who believe that the Resurrection makes sense. To others, it is a mere myth. As I have never tired of saying, though, myth is more real than most of us like to think and whether a tortured and murdered Jewish rabbi rose from the dead 2,000 years ago is really not the issue. It's what we think it means that makes all the difference in the world. Or, take evolution: there are those who believe it is a fact, others who believe it is a theory, and still others who believe it is a bunch of crap. Theories are not truth, but they can be, and most often are -- good ones, at least -- helpful ways of thinking about things. But, here too, it's what we think it means that makes all the difference. There is, however, just a slight problem here, but it's an important one.

One of those unavoidable paradoxes of life is this one: does our (both personal and collective) existence have any meaning, or is it meaningless? You can't have it both ways. There are consequences -- far-reaching and existential -- to our decision on this matter. If life has meaning, then we have to say why and find a way to explain how things can be as screwed up as they are in this world. If life has no meaning, we can easily explain why the world is as screwed up as it is, but we're going to have a bit of trouble trying to justify why we just don't do whatever we want whenever we want, because in the end, it doesn't matter anyway.

That's the problem. The issue, however, is that if you choose "sense", then you must make clear to me what there is so much nonsense in our world. Are you putting it in, or are you cleaning it up? I have my suspicions, but ...

The root of paradox

To be sure, I'm the last person to claim we live in an either-or world. That's a mistake a lot of people make, though. For too many people these days, if you are not for A, you are automatically -- at least in their minds -- for B. That's ignorance in one of its simplest forms.

In general, between any two extremes, there is an infinite number of shades of gray, so to speak, just as there are an infinite number of numbers beween 0 and 1. Our computer geek wizard friends never tire of their digitality, but it is so limited and artificial, but too many ignorant souls like to think they also have something to say about life in general, but they don't. Not all opposites are digital. For example:

The opposite of "love" is "hate". We have two distinct words for these two notions and I think we all agree that they can be considered complementary; that is, there is some kind of scale along which you can go from one to the other. We characterisze the one as positive and the other as negative, which is a methaphorical way of describing them. Then we have single words that describe differences, like "temperature". To make clear what we mean, we use adjectives, like "hot" or or "warm" or "cool" or "cold" to describe just what we mean. There is a difference between, say, hot and cold, but it is not as extreme as are "love" and "hate". It's nice having a cold drink on a hot day, for instance. And then, we have what the Swiss-German cultural philosopher Jean Gebser characterizes as Ur-Wörter (that is, literally, "primal words"); that is a single word to identify a notion and its opposite all in one. For example, the Latin word altus (from which comes our English word "altitude) means both "high" and "low" or sacer (from which we get our English word "sacred") meands both "blessed" and "cursed"; or the Hebrew word GAL, a verb which can mean "to redeem" and "to defile". (In English, we only have one such word left: "cleave" which can mean "to cut apart" and "to meld together".) In the case of such primal words, of course, it is the context that gives the meaning away.

What this all tells us is that human beings haven't always had today's oh, so beloved if-you-not-with-us-your're-against-us mentality. There was certainly a time when the experiential situation brought forth the distinction; and there are times even now when we have to describe to which degree we want to express something, and we all know that the distance from love to hate can be no more than an exceedingly fine line. For the Ancients, all Life played out between 0 and 1 (cf. the Egyptians, the Pythagoreans, etc.), but around the time of the Renaissance, we finally made the split (we -- literally -- divided our thinking and became "rational", which we have imbued with positive connotations, even though the root of the word is division: ratio, as in a/b. Yes, we turned this notion on its head as well.

The point is that if you pursue a notion or a thought deeply enough, you come to a point at which is becomes paradoxical. This is, in fact, one of the primary methods for determining if you are getting to the root or wellspring of a concept, an idea, a notion. In other words, either-or, 0 or 1, is completely meaningless at the level of superficiality of everyday, modern life, regardless of what our geeky friends would have us believe. To delve into the depths, however, takes time, energy, willpower, fortitude, and a good dose of courage, which explains why most people never ever make the effort. It is so much easier to accuse another of not being for you, so obviously they're against you. But it is so only in your own mind.

Sometimes either-or is all you're left with

There is a tension between science and religion, which is, as we saw last time, more imaginary than real.

As most of you know, I'm not a big fan of religion per sé; that is, how those institutions that declare to represent a particular faith go about their business. By the same token, I've made it clear from time to time that I'm no big fan of science either, whereby I mean "science" in the same sense as "religion": how it is practiced by whomever declares themselves representatives of this non-spiritual form of faith.

Fundamentalism -- the most negative and least useful form of belief -- is not restricted to religions, as we commonly understand the term, rather it applies to any way of thinking that insists on belief in spite of facts and which restricts all methods and means of interpretation to those which they are willing to accept or sanction. We have religious fundamentalists that all of us more or less recognize and agree upon, but we have scientistic fundamentalists as well. Most often they make themselves known as militant atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, or revered figures of science who are taken to speak with authority on issues of which they know nothing and are eminently unqualified to pass judgement upon, like Stephen Hawking. Don't get me wrong: I think that both Dawkins and Hawking (who are merely examples, not personifications in any way) are very bright and intelligent people, but being bright is hardly qualification for anything.

There are a lot of bright people in the world. And I would bet that we all know someone every bit as bright or intelligent as Mr. Dawkins or Mr. Hawking, but for some reason, we don't accredit them with much authority at all, which is how it should be. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, or the Dali Lama, for example, are both exceedingly bright and intelligent individuals. Both of them are capable of communicating deep insights into matters of a spiritual nature. But I don't know anyone who would go to either of them to find out whether reality may be a matter of wave-function collapse or for thoughts on whether there is validity to the multiple-universes hypothesis. And rightfully so. What doesn't make sense to me is why individuals like Dawkins and Hawking are allowed to make extra-subject-matter pronouncements that should be taken seriously while individuals like Sacks and the Dali Lama are not (though oddly enough, they don't, for they recognize limits to their own "authority), boils down to a simple fact: at the moment, there is a dominant belief system, and if you don't subscribe to it, you siply have nothing important to say.

Science-as-we-know-it assumes that matter is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting points; this is the fundamental premise of materialism. Anyone coming from the religious or spiritual side of things assumes that G-d or something spiritual/non-physical is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting point. And, the real issue involved is this: both are assumptions; neither can be proved; there is no way that we can know for sure which assumption is true.

In other words, when it comes right down to it ... literally ... we're left with an either-or situation: you can either believe the route to where we are and where we find ourselves is from matter-to-spirit, or you can believe it is from spirit-to-matter. At the moment, we're not aware of a third possibility (whereby, I, personally, don't believe we'll find a third one either).

At first glance, it may appear not to matter what we believe, but it does. Every action we perform, every statement we make, every decision we make can be traced back to this most fundamental distinction. More importantly, what we think, do or say all has unavoidable consequences for all our futures, and for that reason alone, we should get clear with our own selves, just where we're coming from.

Six geese-a-laying

On the sixth day of Christmas, we should stop and reflect
on those who get lost or ignored through neglect
by well-meaning people, like you and like me
but they're there nonetheless, if we choose but to see.

If you've taken the time to give yesterday's question any serious thought, you will most likely have noticed something. It's hard to find a "why" in what you have or want to have ... more often than not we start thinking about what we want to be. This is a existentially fundamental distinction and it makes all the difference in the world. Erich Fromm, the émigré German psychoanalyst, wrote a book in 1942 which should be on everyone's reading list: To Have or To Be. It's not an academic volume of technobabble and overweening erudition, rather it is a simply written, human book that asks you to ask yourself the meaning question, too.

The question whether to have or to be has taken on renewed significance this year in particular as we have seen one country after another fall into extreme financial difficulties, as we witness the epidemic level of foreclosures being exercised by banks, as we struggle to escape the largest economic crisis in our lifetimes and which may be even worse – at least in certain regards – as the one that led to the Great Depression. Let's face it: we're not in very good shape and promising solutions are as good as nowhere to be found.

The result? A air of barbarism, I would say, and I don't think I'm exaggerating. If you want to know what someone thinks, just listen to their choice of words. It will tell you everything you need to know? Has it occurred to anyone besides me that the tenor of public dialogue has become harsher, crueler, more cynical, brash, aggressive and violent. Oh sure, we all know the effects of a good pepper-spraying or clubbing, but what about a well-executed tongue-lashing? You can wash the pepper spray out of your eyes and the cut on your head will heal, but the psychological wounds that are inflicted with words are some of the hardest to heal, and some never, ever heal properly.

Let's be honest, our entire public dialogue, be it in the public square or the presidential debates, is about one subject and one subject only: money. We only ever talk about money. The schools are collapsing because they have no money, and most people don't have money to send their children to other schools. Public services don't function without money and so the fire department watches a house burn down in Kentucky because the owner hadn't paid the subscription fee. Americans don't want to pay taxes because they don't know how the money is spent ... well, maybe building bridges to nowhere but certainly not fixing the ones that are in need of repair. If you step back and listen, I would be willing to bet that within the first 30 seconds of any conversation, debate or argument about any public issue, the money argument will arise: how are we going to pay for it ... or even better, who is going to pay for it.

Unfortunately, it is all only about the money anymore.