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More evidence that our rational self isn’t really the self that’s in charge: as described in a piece by Robert Lee Hotz in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, research suggests that when we “decide” to do something, we’re not really deciding. What we’re really doing is becoming aware of a decision that’s already been made.

In one study, researchers led by John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin monitored “neural currents” in volunteers’ brains (using magnetic resonance imaging) as the volunteers pushed buttons using either their left and right hands. The researchers discovered that they could predict which hand the subjects would use by the neural activity that preceded the button-pushing.

The foundation of this research is the work of
the late Benjamin Libet, who came to similar conclusions.

One way a lot of people respond to these sort of findings is to question whether humans have “free will.” But if you accept the assumption that there is an aspect of the Self that operates more or less independently of the Self with which we generally identify, none of this is the least bit surprising. Of course “Self 2″ causes ripples in the brain’s electromagnetic field. They just happen to be ripples beneath the surface of conscious awareness. It doesn’t mean we don’t have “free will.” It may, however, mean that “free will” is a meaningless concept.

In the WSJ piece, Hotz goes on to report other research that suggests that we make better “consumer decisions” (e.g. what car to buy) when we’re distracted.

See? It’s not just about swinging a golf club ;-)

I’ve been thinking more about Gallwey’s book and the implications of what he discovered about executing the golf swing.

Gallwey observed that there are two different “modes” of being that affect a golf swing. One is judgmental, critical, verbal, analytical. The other is kinesthetic and sub- or non-verbal.

It’s always tricky to describe different aspects of the self or psyche or personality. Gallwey was no dummy. He was writing in the 70s for an audience that hadn’t been acclimated to new agey-type material. So it’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that the terminology he coined to describe these two modes was pretty dry: Self 1 and Self 2, respectively.

As simple designations within the context of mastering a golf (or tennis) swing, that terminology works. But what about off the course?

“Self 2″ is a mode of being that is gained by intent, trust, and a shift to pure awareness — the same state we try to achieve during certain types of meditation. It’s the mode that we associate with “being in the zone,” where everything just flows effortlessly. There’s a kind of magic to it. Here’s a bit from the book:

Before I address the ball, I look at the situation and let Self 2 pick the target. I see the ball already there and convince Self 1 that the results are already accomplished. You might say that I pretend that the desired results have already occurred. This leaves Self 1 with nothing to be tense about or to doubt. It is the ultimate in the doctrine of the easy — what could be easier than to do something that has already taken place?

Now all that is left is to enjoy hitting the ball. In effect, I say to myself, Now that the ball has already landed where you want it, how would you like to have hit it there? Then I express the quality I want to experience by hitting the ball the way I really want to, allowing Self 2 to express himself to his full limits.

Within the scope of Gallwey’s work, this phenomenon resolves down to body vs. “head.” The body knows how to swing a golf club. The golfer must simply get his head out of the way so that his body can execute the swing unimpeded.

But anyone who’s looked at any of the “self help” literature published in the 40 years since Gallwey’s first Inner Game books will recognize this template. What’s more, it’s been applied — over & over — to activities that have nothing to do with sports. From Joseph Murphy and Neville Goddard up through Esther Hicks and Deepak Chopra, the advice is identical to Gallwey’s golf swing routine: set a goal, picture it accomplished, and then get out of the way and let the path to the goal unfurl.

What’s interesting is the terminology people use to describe “Self 2.” Murphy is one of many who use “subconscious.” Neville Goddard — perhaps reflecting how slippery this terminology becomes — sometimes fell back on metaphor but also used “Imagination,” “The Divine Body,” “the inner body” (in e.g. Awakened Imagination), “consciousness,” and the “I AM” (e.g. The Power of Awareness). Some writers go right to the heady mystery of it and ascribe to it Divinity (”let go and let God”). Others don’t bother with naming it at all, but focus on process.

Mulling all this over the past few days, the term I’m drawn to most, unfortunately, is “daemon.” Unfortunately because a daemon, to inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is a demon, aka evil disembodied creature best left well alone. Too bad we can’t rescue the word, at least in some form — revert back to how Socrates, for instance, spoke of his daimonion (”little daimon”) in terms of

“a divine or supernatural experience . . . It began in my early childhood — a sort of voice that comes to me; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on.”

That’s from Plato’s Apology, my Penguin Classics edition I picked up somewhere for two bucks.

Socrates was drawing on an older use of the word, as described here by Wikipedia:

The Proto-Indo-European root *deiwos for god, originally an adjective meaning “celestial” or “bright, shining” has retained this meaning in many related Indo-European languages and cultures (Sanskrit deva, Latin deus, German Tiw, Welsh [Duw],]), but also provided another other common word for demon in Avestan daeva.

In modern Greek, the word daimon (Greek: ??????) has the same meaning as the modern English demon. But in Ancient Greek, ?????? meant “spirit” or “higher self”, much like the Latin genius. This should not, however, be confused with the word genie, which is a false friend or false cognate of genius.

Socrates’ daimonion got him in a world of sh*t, of course, since the Athenians in power were nervous about people following their own little daimons instead of state-recognized gods.

Politics aside, to my thinking, the Socratic notion of daimon gets a little closer to the real nature of Self 2. Self 2 is more than mere body consciousness; it possesses an intelligence that is in many ways superior to that of Self 1, and capabilities that extend beyond mere physical acts. This explains why it comes into play in experiences that involve more than our bodies — that involve events and objects over which we have no direct physical influence. It explains as well its association with our blessings and success — one’s daimon serves as a midwife who delivers blessings into one’s life.

That said, I’m equally impatient with teachings (including a lot of Buddhist literature) that denigrate Self 1. Just because we develop habits of self-criticism that are against our best interests doesn’t mean Self 1 is an obstacle to be overcome or destroyed (!) — we are as wrong to demonize the ego as to demonize the daimon. Both were given to us by the source God, after all. Instead, we should view Self 1 as a kind of personal GPS: it feeds back data we need about where we are and whether our coordinates are to our liking, and identifies conditions that we can use for goal-setting.

The trick is to cultivate a partnership between these two “selves.” Ideally, Self 1 evaluates current coordinates and pinpoints suitable future coordinates. Then Self 2 — the daimon — guides us and executes the actions necessary to move us toward those coordinates.

That’s where the giddiness comes in, of course, because much of what the daimon does is invisible to the ego. So Self 1 has to chill out and trust that its goals will be met even though evidence of that fact might be in scarce supply. Faith as evidence of things unseen and all that.

What Gallwey discovered is that during this stage, we can fall back on simple awareness. This displaces our tendency to over-analyze or engage in constant verbal critiquing — mental activities that inhibit the daimon’s ability to do its work.

None of this gibes with official Christianity, of course, a discrepancy that Philip Pullman has tried to exploit with the His Dark Materials books. Too bad, really — Pullman is no doubt very bright, but a spiritual crank (c.f. his fixation with mischaracterizing the writings of a man who, being dead, can’t defend them. What a waste of fame.) Even without intellects like Pullman’s around to egg things on, however, I suppose it would take some time before we could return “demon/daemon/daimon” to its rightful usage — in fact, if I were a scholar I’d look for evidence that early Christian authorities took their position on demons right from the Athenian playbook. Persuade people to mistrust their inner voice and you make them dependent on your official pronunciations. It’s an old trick but we still fall for it, sorry, Socrates.

Or we keep our work beneath the radar by using terms like “subconscious” or “Self 2″ — words that are safe precisely because they don’t evoke the real mystery and power that is there for us to explore — if we dare to trust how close we really are to the divine . . .

Via Megan McArdle, Robert Reich has proposed a “new tax policy” on his blog.

He begins the title of his post “The Logic of Taxing the Rich” and tries to head off criticism from the right by stating up front that “taxing the super-rich is not about class envy.”

But he also keeps using the word “fair,” not only in his blog post . . .

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich (earning over $500,000 a year). Plus an annual wealth tax of one half of one percent on net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets….If the Democrats stand for anything, it’s a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation.

But also in a comment me left on McArdle’s blog:

If you consider (as the writer of this [McArdle's] blog wishes to do) state sales taxes (which are highly regressive), state income taxes (usually flat and therefore also regressive), sin taxes on cigarettes and liquor (regressive as well), and payroll taxes (regressive because they only hit the first $97K or so of income), then my argument is, I believe, even stronger.

Mankew, for his part, assumes deadweight losses that any tax system creates, and disregards not only the reality of new revenues — deadweight notwithstanding — but also considerations of simple fairness.

Interesting.

Why invoke “fairness” if the argument is based in logic?

No reason that I can see. On the contrary: appealing to “fairness” is obviously an ethical argument, not a logical one.

In fact, the elephant in the room of any tax debate is really an ethical question.

It’s a question with two pieces.

First, are wealthy people obligated, ethically, to shoulder a greater burden proportionally of the costs of running a country?

And second, do we accept a priori that our government has an ethical mandate to serve as arbiter of what that burden should be?

Proponents of “progressive” taxation answer yes to both questions — and so our politicians become the modern day priestly class, endowed with the moral authority to mete out compensation to the wronged — endowed with the moral authority to make the “unfair” “fair.”

What bothers me is that we — and by “we” I mean our nation as a whole — got here without really reconciling ourselves to it. Sure, the ethics of progressive taxation were raised at the time. Here’s Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, for instance:

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty.

Of course no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual — a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed by the National and not the State Government.

To paraphrase: some rich people got so by being unscrupulous; we can’t really tell who they are, so we should tax all the rich to make sure the bad apples are separated from their ill-gotten gains. It’s only fair!

How many people, today, would agree with this “logic”?

I wonder. Clearly there is residual unease with the whole notion of progressive taxation, which suggests to me we didn’t really tackle it for what it is, head on and honestly. And so we were left with the lingering sense that it was foisted upon us, somehow — that our politicians were overly opportunistic in how they pulled the whole thing off.

I mean, think about it. Within a generation — a generation — of the passage of the 16th Amendment we had a federal income tax rate which — at the lowest income bracket — had increased by a factor of 20.

That’s a stunning leap.

The assumption of a social services agenda by the federal government was every bit as swift. One minute you have FDR outlining, in a Fireside Chat, the ethical basis for social security (and sounding at times an awful lot like his cousin 28 years before):

. . . the primary concern of any Government dominated by the humane ideals of democracy is the simple principle that in a land of vast resources no one should be permitted to starve. Relief was and continues to be our first consideration. It calls for large expenditures and will continue in modified form to do so for a long time to come. We may as well recognize that fact. It comes from the paralysis that arose as the after-effect of that unfortunate decade characterized by a mad chase for unearned riches and an unwillingness of leaders in almost every walk of life to look beyond their own schemes and speculations.

And then, within a quarter of a century, the New Deal — a notion that arose during a period of international upheaval — had given birth to The Great Society, and from there . . . well. According to this Social Security Administration data, between 1960 and 1995 federal spending on “social welfare expenditures” had risen, as a percentage of GDP, from 4.9 percent to 12.4 percent. More than doubled.

We have, in other words, a National Tithe.

Charity — even more broadly, charity to strangers — is a deep-seated Western value. Old Testament scripture is full of exhortations that we should give to the poor — that being kind to the needy honors God.

It’s in our cultural blood; we are reconciled to it. This is why even the most secular of us will likely agree that we’re morally obligated to be charitable.

What is new is the notion that the government ought to be the intermediary.

And that, I believe, is where the unease creeps in — and rightly so.

First, a private, spiritual virtue has been rendered a public, social obligation.

Where’s the redemption in that? Am I a better person for having a Federal Withholding deducted from my paycheck? Put another way: when the sacrifice my “charity” represents was not made by my own free will, does it have the same moral stature as it otherwise would?

And then there’s the potential for corruption, which happens on multiple levels. Here’s one: our politicians buy votes with social programs — that can’t be disputed; it’s woven into every politician’s platform (have you heard any serious political contender advocate repealing social security? I thought not) — but how can we view their naked self-interest for what it is?

We can’t, because it’s clocked in the language of an ethical mandate.

Or this: the huge temptation created by pooling so much money in one place, and so far from home. How many people make a living by administering our public social programs? It’s an industry unto itself. How well is it policed? How efficient is it? How selfless are these people? Some are, I’m sure — but others are assuredly not. Is that — any bleeding off of this money for less-than-charitable uses — not another corruption?

Step back and look at federal spending as a whole. Compare total federal spending as a percent of GDP in 1940 to today. It’s doubled, from just under 10 percent to about 20 percent. How much of that rise is, honestly, justified? Were there other ways to fund the things we’ve funded? Would our foreign policy now be different had we not handed over so much of our money to our government?

How much corruption have we funded?

There’s no way to know. We’ve ceded control. All we know is that our “needs” as our politicians define them have magically kept pace with the amount of money available.

Or how about this. People who advocate progressive taxation can’t part “the super rich” from their money unaided. They know they can’t. They need help. They need . . . politicians.

And so you have one group of Americans turning to the government — a source of Power — to force another group of people to contribute more to the national budget.

When “conservatives” suggest that progressive taxes are a form of communism, this is the crux of their complaint: that a centralized government has been made the vehicle for parting citizens with their money. And it’s at bottom an ethical objection, because while this may be couched in terms of leveling the difference between the powerful and the weak, it is also an act of overriding the powerful with the yet-more-powerful.

Is that fair?

The whole issue feels muddy to me. It cries out to be argued, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, honestly: in terms of the ethics that underpin it — not falsely; not as if the ethical questions have all been answered, because they haven’t.

If they even can be answered. Perhaps they can’t be. Perhaps we’re too secularized, too unmoored from the old fashioned truisms that we once used to settle ethical questions.

But in that case we can at least be honest in another way, and admit that what we’re really doing is jostling for power, jostling for control over the pot of money the Roosevelts caused to be set aside by the richest country in the world . . . and that “fairness” has nothing to do with it.

Technorati Tags: progressive taxation, social security, federal spending

That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

– C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingnes,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Technorati Tags: religion, science

A lot has been said about writing as an act of creation, so much so that we’ve probably become more jaded than we realize. Articulating experience via language is, after all, so simple a child can do it. And self-proclaimed Writers are ubiquitous. You’ve probably heard, as I have, that some 80 percent of Americans think they’ve got what it takes to be a writer. Those of us who take writing a bit more seriously are easily creeped out by such suggestions. “Keep it to yourself,” we mutter under our breath. “You’re turning my stomach. As is your prose.”

Yet even bad writing thrills the writer as it erupts. Why? Why? Why do so many of us feel a compulsion to articulate experience?

Perhaps because it represents an even more fundamental compulsion. Here’s from Jung’s memoir, something he wrote after watching massive herds of animals grazing on a savannah in Africa:

. . . the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes . . . man is indispensable for the completion of creation . . . in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence — without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

Writing, as an act, embodies the act of secondary creation. It objectifies existence, literally: all at once that which we know to have created is visible in three dimensions.

It doesn’t matter what kind of writing it is, whether it’s a blog post, or a novel, or an email to a friend, or a weepy entry in a private journal. It is a relief to do it. No matter how nonsensical the act itself make sense of our experience.

The mystery of words is that they are also, however, unruly creatures. You may think they are tools at your command, but they are also messengers. They dwell on the cusp between objective and unconscious reality; this is why they can have double meanings, or express sometimes things that we claim we didn’t intend them to express.

That same quality also makes them a delight, of course, which is why gaining a bit of skill as a writer makes the act even more pleasurable — the act of secondary creation, performed with some inkling of awareness, or rendered artfully enough that in partaking of it we begin to waken, even slightly — it’s a heady thing — it is why we recognize that some writing as Art.

Take love, for instance, plenty of examples here. A mystic will tell you that if you reach the leafy crown of the magical beanstalk ;-) you’ll discover all love is really The One Love. But down here in the world of foolishness and poverty and dirt and beans we have, instead, this sort of love and that sort of love. Then come along the secondary creators who play with the word. Ray Charles secularizes the gospel song “Jesus is All the World to Me” and in so doing casts words of Christian love into the service of Romantic love. Sixty years later, Alison Krauss goes back the other way, recording a song about Christian love, only the object of her love is hidden, slyly, within the vernacular of romantic pop:

Am I a fool for hanging on?
Would I be a fool to be long gone?
When is daylight going to dawn
On my crazy faith?

The questions will not let me sleep
Answers buried way too deep
At the bottom of a lover’s leap
Made by crazy faith.

Lowell George’s fat man in the bathtub isn’t suffering unrequited love. He’s having trouble scoring drugs. That said, it’s no coincidence that being “in love” is a dopamine high — and ho ho ho, cocaine also happens to elevate the brain’s dopamine levels: even down here in the world of dirt and beans it’s easy to find overlaps, universality is also biological, the language overlaps, the poignancy of this sort of love overlaps the poignancy of that sort of love.

Spotcheck Billy got down on his hands and knees
He said “Hey momma, hey let me check your oil all right?”
She said “No, no honey, not tonight
Come back Monday, come back Tuesday, then I might.”

I said Juanita, my sweet Jaunita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
I said Jaunita, my sweet taquita, what are you up to?
My Juanita

An unanswerable question, of course. But there’s some relief to be had by putting it down on paper.

(1975 video of Lowell singing Fat Man is here. Cleaner recording. I like the rendering of Rock and Roll doctor from the same session more though.)

Technorati Tags: writing

When I was younger, I let my emotions drive my choices (often to my eventual sorrow, sigh) and I suppose I still do to some extent but at least now I make an effort to engage my emotional responses as consciously as I can — part of which involves trying to free them such that they flow their courses more easily, reveal themselves more fully & thereby reveal also the contours of the landscape their flowing paints.

Since I’m by nature a kinesthetic person this involves paying close attention to where feelings lodge. Lately I’ve also jettisoned the distinction between purely physical feelings — e.g. pain or tension — and emotions. My working theory is that there is no difference, really: the physical body acts as a tangible map of the emotions; physical sensations are simply a more intense inclination of the map’s contours.

So I look for tools that help me bridge through my body to the emotions beneath it, and here’s one of the best I’ve found: a book of execises that combine yoga and the stimulation of accupressure points. Awkward title, unfortunately — Acu-Yoga???? — but I can forgive that; it’s one of the most valuable books I own.

Whether the techniques described in the book actually “do” anything is, of course, entirely a matter of speculation. Perhaps the exercises are more a way to ritualize a routine of auto-suggestion and physical relaxation.

But it works. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: yoga, emotions

No ideas but in things is more than a poet’s conceit. Case in point: according to this Scientific American article by David Biello, behavioral researchers Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University are slowly documenting an overlap between the physical act of washing and a sense of being morally cleansed.

The researchers are also interested in whether there’s a correlation between “environmental cleanliness” and behavior.

Perhaps the outside of the cup matters after all.

Technorati Tags: science, ethics

Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)

Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.

Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”

I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)

My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.

Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.

I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.

What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph, of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:

Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .

Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memory”.

Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”

Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.

Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”

Know in their hearts? LOL

Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:

Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

Excuse me? Scientists may not “blow each other up” literally, but they are all too happy to mine each other’s professional reputations and careers if they feel their assumptions are political power is being threatened. Even when the “controversy” is as mundane as why our muscles get sore when we exercise.

The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.

Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.

Technorati Tags: Sigmund Freud, empiricism, spirituality

I’m fascinated by the idea of transformation: the idea that a person might be born one thing, and then through intention, will, perhaps practice, become something else.

If it happens at all, true transformation is exceedingly rare, although to appreciate how rare you need to look past appearances. Consider the picture painted by this review of a biography of Ava Gardner (”A Wicked, Wicked Life,” by Lee Server), online at the Literary Review. Reviewer Frank McLynn writes that Gardner

exemplified the classic rags-to-riches fable. The seventh child of a North Carolina sharecropping tobacco farmer, she was what the unkind describe as poor white trailer trash, with accent and ambitions to match. The height of her aspirations was to be a secretary in New York, but she was ‘discovered’ from a chance snapshot in a photographer’s window and whisked away to Hollywood for the big star build-up, purely on the basis of her looks.

Her physical circumstances were radically altered. Yet if you read on in the article, you learn that Gardner lived the sort of chaotic, alcohol-sodden life that you can glimpse by flicking on an episode of Cops. The changes to her life were purely superficial.

A contemporary with a somewhat similar experience is Archie Leach — aka Cary Grant. Like Gardner, Grant was born into near-poverty, went to Hollywood, and assumed a life of wealth and glamour. As part of his apparent transformation, Grant changed his name as well as his accent. But was he really transformed? I don’t know. But he seems to have had doubts himself; he’s quoted as saying, “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each.”

McLynn concludes his piece on Gardner thus:

As she herself often admitted, she was at root a simple country girl, with a country girl’s values and attitudes, pitchforked into a world of unreality simply because of her beauty. She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and after all who could blame her?

I can’t blame anyone for grabbing what is handed them. But I also can’t give up the idea that there should be more — that as self-aware beings we should be doing more than reacting to what happens to us.

Assuming, of course, that the alternative is even possible.

Technorati Tags: transformation

Found this morning via Instapundit: a blog about neuroscience and metacognition written for lay people. I’ve just added it to my blogroll after reading a post there about a political blogger’s decision to close comments.

The article argues, based on research on mirror neurons (which I’ve blogged about here) and other phenomenon that avoiding unhappy people, and surrounding yourself with people who exhibit qualities you want to cultivate in yourself, is a highly rational and constructive thing to do.

One piece of advice you often find in self-help books on personal transformation is that sometimes you need to drop your old friends and find new ones. It turns out that bit of folk wisdom may actually have a basis in science . . .

Technorati Tags: mirror neurons, emotional contagion, happiness