A Primo #Facepalm Moment

To be a citizen of the United States is to experience many face palm moments. And recent Supreme Court decisions have provided some spectacular face palm moments.

Full disclosure: I take oppression of workers a bit personally. I escaped wage slavery only by luck. And my mother worked in the sort of retail store that Hobby Lobby is.

The Hobby Lobby decision this week by the US Supreme Court supplies one more example of why humanists often get irate and irrational about religion. After all, the scenario appears to be a no-brainer: an employer has a particular religious opinion. An employee has another or none.  The employer sues, protesting a benefit the employee needs. Tough taco employer. right?

A no-brainer. But . . . #facepalm! . . . not in the United States. Here, individual liberty trumps the the public good a bit too often. Now, I know, the Supreme Court is that branch of government that brought you, oh, let’s see—#facepalm!—decisions such as Dred Scott and Citizens United. But still.

To the Manor Born

Most Supreme Court decisions are routine and uncontroversial. Those don’t make the news, so most citizens get a skewed picture of the court. But, reflect for a moment on the peculiarity that US citizens do not wonder about how our Supreme Court will reason their way through a politicized case to a just decision. We only have to look at the politics of most cases to know how most decisions will go. We only need to know the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties to forecast how “law” and “reason” will turn out.

Such was the case in the Hobby Lobby case. There was never any doubt of the decision. It’s just a matter of counting the judges who have a particular political opinion.

How many babies will be born into this nation of the brave and the free and the frayed social safety net? How much hope does a child born to a parent who works at Hobby Lobby have? Will any of those kids get lucky, like me?

It’s not likely. What’s the percentage of people who make it into the One Percent? #facepalm! (Or like lucky, lucky me, the Five Percent?) And how many of those weren’t born into the One Percent? Or Five Percent?

Cue (and Queue) the Crazies   

Does this decision open the door for all kinds of religious objections to all sorts of things? Yes. For Christians, anyway. The unspoken law behind the decision is that Christianity is the only real and true religion, and the merits of others to be decided by whatever local powers there might be, in whatever courts may be nearby. (Read “Christian” jury.)

Humorist Will Rogers once said, “America has the best politicians money can buy.” Also, America has the best religion money can buy—to every citizen a religion custom- tailored to support our prejudices. Here’s the thing: whatever your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, if the top tenant of your religion is not fostering the wellbeing of your fellow human beings, it is bad religion.

As a humanist, I have no excuses for damaging the well being of another. The central focus of my ethics must be promoting the flourishing of my fellow humans, animals, and the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facepalm#mediaviewer/File:Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg

As we enjoy the fireworks in the United States, we do well to meditate a bit on the difference between rights and responsibilities. Yes, we are a nation of laws. Often those rights and those laws are (facepalm!) irresponsible.

Wallace Stevens once said, “How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.” At first glance, this perhaps sounds like a Disneyesque reflection on the uses of a hearty imaginal life. Or—since Stevens was a poet—a reflection on the power of metaphor to set solid things flying.

At second glance—since Stevens was both a poet and an atheist—perhaps it is a reflection on what he saw as the most fruitful power in the universe—the human mind’s power to construct meaning as we go along in an otherwise material and un-human universe.

Most likely, Stevens meant all these things and more. After all, his poems sport beautiful and improbable and impermanent “furniture” such as peacocks, round jars in Tennessee, and Emperors of Ice-Cream. Stevens also wrote of “the palm at the end of the mind.” Yes, the palm is a tropical tree. It is also the human hand, our hands. We ourselves are the end of meaning . . . because we are the only creatures in the world that reach for something called meaning, at least something called “human meaning.”

Moment to moment we are faced with a question: How do I make sense of my life? “It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room,” Stevens wrote, “with something more than furniture.” And it is only one’s thoughts that fill a universe full of furniture with meaning.

Religions (and the lack thereof) reflect the values of the cultures in which they develop. Religions (and their lack) serve as both a reflection of the aspirations of particular groups and also as guides for individuals within a group when we may be in doubt concerning what our culture and our religious belief or non-belief requires of us. They also fill the room with more than furniture. They help us make sense of our lives.

Pragmatist philosophers claim that labeling one “truth” as “false” and another as “true” doesn’t reveal much. It is more useful to see all views—religious and otherwise—as devices to get results. After all, if beliefs did not get results, they would not survive the test of time. The question—at least for those who are free enough of theocracy to have a choice—is which of the many ways of seeing produce the most desirable results,which make the most sense our of life.

Is it somehow useful for making sense of life, for instance, to believe that Fridays which fall on the 13th of the month have special properties?

Over time human beings have posited two very different views of how the world works. One view is that the order we see is the order that is: sure, we will keep discovering more and more about that order, but it’s all out there to observe, albeit some of it observable only with a large hadron collider.

The opposite view (the opposite “truth”) is that there is a higher order not discoverable by observation. This is usually accompanied by speculation concerning a god or gods, though it doesn’t have to. (For example, the Renaissance-era belief in alchemy did not require gods in order to function, even though that belief system existed in parallel to Christianity. )

These polar opposites are not always opposite in practice. Many otherwise “materialist” people leave room for “powers unseen,” as the Book of Common Prayer would have it. Be that as it may, there is a great gulf fixed between those who trust observation to reveal “truth” and those who depend up the revelation of sacred texts and seers of various sorts, be they prophets or gurus.

Wallace Stevens was on the side of observation. He found the most reliable way to get results was to posit a lack of meaning (at least human meaning) beyond the human mind.

Is there a difference between the words of Moses and the words of Wallace Stevens? Stevens thought not. Sure, some poets and some poems are better at filling rooms with more than furniture, and large hadron colliders can rewrite all we know about the room and the furniture. Yet, in essence, it’s all about the human imagination. It’s up to us to animate the room with sense and meaning.

We ourselves are the end of (human) meaning . . . because we are the only creatures in the world that reach for something called (human) meaning. Moment to moment we are faced with a question: How do I make sense of my life? For some of us “truth” is our way of animating the furniture, and we assume our sense is not the sense of another.  It is an entertaining place to live.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm_tree_symbol.svg

As Stevens put it,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Imagine

I’m sometimes asked how humanists can have “church” without invoking god. Here’s how I think about it:

Imagine this scenario: When Imhotep in ancient Egypt invoked the great god Ra, he was invoking the human consciousness, not Ra Almighty.

Imagine this: When Zadok, son of Ahitub, entered the holy of holies of Solomon’s brand new temple, perhaps he was talking to the greatest power on this earth—the human imagination.

Imagine this: When the evangelist Billy Graham made his vast alter calls in stadiums across North America, the Christ that thousands flocked to . . . was the human psyche. Whatever you think about powers beyond, imagine this for just a moment.

Entertain the thought for just a moment that every shaman, priest, and prophet who has ever lived . . . has created worship without god because . . . there never has been six or three or one to begin with.

Shared Subjective Reality

But wait! Isn’t there more to the question? Because, even granted the accuracy of my imaginings, didn’t Imhotep and Zadok and Billy Graham each have the advantage of speaking to people who shared a subjective reality?

Didn’t the Egyptians of Imhotep’s time have a mental image of Ra and the Hebrews of Zakok’s time have a notion of Yahweh and the Christians of Billy Graham’s time a common picture of Christ the Lord?

Good question. Did they really? Are people really like that? Or did the priests and preachers have, rather, the apparatus of worship embedded in a particular place and time—Ra’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, or the vast football stadiums of Jesus with great PA systems?

Could it be that what they all had is an apparatus for worship that individual psyches journeyed to . . . . Can we seriously argue that each ancient Egyptian had an identical psychological understanding of Ra? Not likely. But they did have a temple, didn’t they? Doesn’t the very fact of the rabbinic tradition argue that Hebrew worshipers exited Zadok’s services with very different views of ultimate reality? Still, they had that temple, didn’t they?

Weren’t there as many Christs as there were Christians in Billy Graham’s vast alter calls? Yet they came to that structure of power and fame called a stadium or an auditorium, didn’t they? They came to hear Billy.

All Churchy

What’s so churchy about church? The apparatuses of worship change with time, as do the words and the concepts. It is the human mind and human needs for purpose and meaning that remain that same and come to the temple, the stadium, or the storefront church. These are what remain the same. For humanists, that’s as holy as it gets. And that’s fine: the proof is in the pudding. Ra’s pudding doesn’t do much for many of us. But the pudding of gathering together into community is quite tasty.

Just imagine that the point of worship (humanists prefer “assembly”) is calling individuals into community. Imagine that a community created in this way agrees to agree—despite individual understandings—on particular values that sometimes—in the best-case scenario—lead to objective common actions that may be considered moral and ethical (actions better because they spring from a common purpose).

That’s what “worship”—uh, assembling—will or won’t do. Gathering to invoke Ra or any of the deities or no deity at all leads to the same thing. It’s the human mind imbued with meaning and purpose and communal action that matter.

Imagine . . .

Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey once said, “Growth itself is the only moral end.” To philosophers a word like “only” means a lot more than it does to most of us. And here, in the Twenty-First Century, looking back on the wreckage and horror of the Twentieth, it’s easy to dismiss such a sentiment with a “meh” and move on to the next soundbite. And “self-help”? Fahgettaboudit!

After all, we’ve had it up to our ears with “growth,” haven’t we? Now we know something Dewey did not: that when “personal” met “growth,” sparks flew and wedding bells rang, and out of that union many fortunes and many suckers have been born. It’s easy at this point to cynically dismiss the whole enchilada.

“Development” is an even more problematic word. “Personal development.” Ugh. That’s the personal. And in the communal sphere, some of us live in the “developed world” where we have “developers” producing something called . . . “developments.” These developments have produced a great deal of sterile, ugly space.

Somewhere, sometime, in the last century many came to believe that the “onward and upward” march of humanity wasn’t such a sound formula for growth. Somewhere back there “onward” and “upward” and “developed” too often began it mean trodding on the heads of the poor, over the bodies of animals and plants, across the last bits of pristine earth.

(The spell check  tries to prevent me from typing “trodding,” offering instead “trod” and “trodden.” Is there a grammatical conspiracy against admitting that we have trodden and we are trodding still?)

Somewhere in there humanists such as Dewey, who thought that it was all up to humanity itself, not a supernatural being, to do the growing and developing began to be dismissed as naive. Somewhere in there the neo-orthodox, such as theologian Karl Barth, began to say—can’t you see that Satan, or at the least humanity’s flawed nature, is in charge and must be handled with a chain?

When Dewey said “growth itself is the only moral end,” he meant we, us—he meant growing, developing, cultivating the human psyche and human interactions, not the wetlands or the aquifers. He meant our individual and communal selves. Dewey meant development and growth in such things as ethics and art and democracy, not in the grossness of the national product. Or the boundaries of empire.

In this, Dewey was joining a long line of non-Christian Western philosophers who taught that eudaimonia, “human flourishing,” arises through an “examined life” lived in pursuit of virtue. It isn’t about human perfection, but rather about being a bit better than we were born, a bit better than other primates such as we.

The human right to this pursuit may have been what Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he wrote that human beings have three “unalienable rights,” one of which is the “pursuit of happiness.”

That this curious and intriguing phrase gets discussed far less in the United States than what the Second Amendment means, and what it allows, perhaps tells us more than we want to know about the development of the US since that document declared independence. I suspect that Jefferson would have agreed with Dewey that democracy itself “begins in conversation.” That’s the communal aspect of growth.

As another fan of the pursuit of virtue, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, put it, “I believe the process of understanding the problems is itself a good.” This is not about talk; it is about conversation—and you can’t converse alone. Conversation is democracy. It is communal. And it is growth, when we actually converse rather than pontificate—an ability based in individual growth.

If the pursuit of happiness were defined as the ability to pursue questions of virtue, isn’t it interesting to consider what it would mean for each US citizen to have the right to pursue happiness?

The pursuit of happiness . . . Should I head for the self-help section of my local bookstore to begin my pursuit?  Uh, no. The pursuit of happiness—the pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of truth and meaning and democracy—exists as conversation for a good reason—it’s communal as well as personal. Perhaps that’s the biggest reason Jefferson’s line gets ignored—we have defined happiness as an individual pursuit in the United States, land of individualists and of self-help. That solipsism has had its logical outcome in mass murder and misery. 

The personal growth Dewey advocated was a personal growth within the larger communal whole. The pursuit of virtue, after all, is about how we treat others far more than it is about how we treat ourselves. Dewey had in mind the ideal of the Socratic dialogue, which isn’t easy to live up to. It can’t be found on TV. Or among pundits.

Growth itself is the only moral end because it is about striving to be a better human being for the good of the whole, for human flourishing. The gods can’t be much help with that. It is a profoundly human-ist thing to do.

Let’s say I tell you I’m wearing a tinfoil hat today . . . What does that say to you? Crazy? Paranoid? Safe from the mental meddling of governments and/or extraterrestrials?

It’s shorthand, isn’t it? A tinfoil hat says crazy or paranoid or safe, not because of anything inherent in the tinfoil hat, but because we equate wearing a tinfoil hat with a set of behaviors that could be well described as crazy or paranoid or staying safe—“tinfoil hat” is a symbol for a set of beliefs—that, for example, space aliens or perhaps one government or another is sending messages into my brain by electric means.

The first known appearance of a tinfoil hat is in a science fiction story published in 1927 by the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. In that story, tinfoil hats prevent interference from mental telepathy.

Now, if you look for how tinfoil hats work on Yahoo Answers, you will discover this advice:

Tin foil does not work. I tried aluminum foil for my first thought screen helmet in 1998 and it was a failure. Thought screens made from velostat work. I’ve been making them since 1999 and sending them to abductees all over the world for free for 13 years.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121017081732AAn0A1T

Now, in case you’re like me and didn’t know, velostat is a packing material used to block electronic effects. So it goes.

I want to notice two things about this brief look at tinfoil hats. First, “tinfoil hat” has come to mean something way beyond merely a hat made of a particular material. And, second, how quickly we rocket from a discussion of tinfoil hats to a discussion of more efficient hats to evade thought surveillance.

Both of these things have to do with the human imagination. How the human imagination works. We make symbols. Then, often, we fall into the trap of treating a symbol as if it were a reality. We easily mistake symbols, and symbolic statements, for literal truths.

The simplest example is perhaps flags. We create a flag to symbolize a nation or some other grouping of people. Then we create rules and customs around how flags must be treated.

I’ve heard people debate whether a particular piece of cloth is a flag or only bunting—because you can burn bunting, but burning a flag might get you into trouble.

We create a symbol, then we treat the symbol as a reality. The flag becomes the nation. And so on.

Educator Hugh Mearns had something to say about this propensity back in 1899 when he wrote a poem in response to a brouhaha in the town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia concerning a ghost sighting. One of the poem’s verses goes like this:

 Last night I saw upon the stair,

A little man who wasn’t there,

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

It appears that we can make symbols of things that aren’t there at all. And then the symbol becomes a thing we can imagine.

We enter into pretend realms very early in childhood—you be Batman; I’ll be Joker. I’m an elephant. I’m a unicorn. When we play these games, we agree to certain rules. We agree to be bound by the logic of the game. Just as do the folks who wear tinfoil hats or who set out to make a better tinfoil hat. Or who imagine little men on stairs that aren’t there.

We can go to a murder mystery dinner party set in the 1920s and act as if we have murdered someone. Or act as if we are a Belgian detective. We can go to a Renaissance festival where corporate lawyers become barmaids and carpenters become knights.

We choose a game, we agree to obey the rules of the game, and then we act . . . as if.

This is how fiction works. There are all sorts of fictions, each written according to the rules of the game that the author asks us to play. Perhaps the novel is naturalistic—in that case, everything that happens will happen according to the observable and describable rules of the universe.

We can have “magical realism,” in which the world operates more or less as it does in our own world, but occasionally odd things happen—such as people flying away.

We can also have fantasy—that is, a world in which the rules we know do not apply. But even there, notice, there ARE rules of the game. Devotees of Star Trek or of the World of Warcraft will be quick to point out when an action goes outside the rules of that particular fantasy world.

We agree to the rules of a particular form of government. Or of economics. Of of religion. In these cases, usually, we have very little in the way of choice about playing the game—we are born in places where a set of games with rules are already in place—this is called culture and tradition.

Those who choose to ignore the rules are ostracized or punished. The rules of the games called culture and tradition often insist that you WILL see the little man on the stair—or at least say you do—, even if you cannot see the little man.

However, the difference between knowing you are playing a game with rules and thinking you are seeing reality are very different things, aren’t they?

Some games we choose, and some we don’t. No one is born wearing a tinfoil hat. Or saluting a particular flag. Or worshiping a particular god. Mostly, such games with their particular rules are forced upon us by geography or social status or educational attainment or mental health.

Am I really equating tin foil hats and patriotism, you might be asking. Yes, I am. Because I think the examined life requires that sort of examination. Until we see the games we are enmeshed in with some clarity, we have seen neither truth nor reality. We have not examined life.

So, what’s your game? Do tinfoil hats come in handy?