Saturday, June 24, 2006

GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST: THE END OF FAITH EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH SAM HARRIS We are born ready to live in relationship to the world around us. We emerge from our mother's wombs ready to see faces as faces, to learn language, and to gradually recognize that we are in the presence of minds like our own. The prevalence of animism among our primitive ancestors—as well as its persistence in certain tribes—demonstrates that we readily ascribe human qualities to processes in nature. It is only by gaining a deeper understanding of causal processes in the world (through science) that we come to realize that storm clouds are not angry gods and that diseases are not the result of demonic possession. It is difficult to say where we should draw the line between genetic endowment and cultural inheritance, and both are surely operative in the case of religious belief. But the basic fact is that, yes, we are deeply disposed to broadcast our own subjectivity onto the world. The biblical God is jealous, angry—deplorably neurotic, in fact. And the Greek gods were like teenagers left alone in their parents' house for the weekend. The fact that we may be predisposed to conceive of the universe in anthropomorphic terms does not mean that we are condemned to do so, however.   With most higher cognitive traits, the search for an explanation in terms of single genes is probably hopeless. But whatever the story is at the genetic level, biology only loosely determines culture in any case. We need to eat, but we don't need to eat pasta. We are prone to jealousy, but this emotion can play itself out in the manner of Cary Grant or in the manner of Mullah Omar. Same biology, different culture. Much of our behavior as human beings, while it may emerge from our biology, is perpetuated in its present form merely because we have not felt sufficient pressure to change it. Culture does not systematically improve the design of its products (neither does biology for that matter). So, while we should expect to see important differences across cultures, these differences may not reflect anything deeper about us than the fact that human communities tend to keep using the tools they've got for as long as these tools are serviceable. Consider the difference between Eastern and Western medicine.   Are they equivalently useful? No. Is Eastern medicine better for Easterners? No. While Eastern medicine may be applicable to certain health problems, and may even surpass Western medicine in a few areas, there is simply no comparison between these two disciplines. No one with an appendicitis, an aneurysm, or breast cancer would be wise to rush off to her acupuncturist before going to the hospital. This is true in New York, and it is just as true in Hong Kong.   With respect to spiritual practice, however, the disparity clearly runs the other way. While Eastern mysticism has its fair share of unjustified belief, it undoubtedly represents humankind's best attempt at fashioning a spiritual science. The methods of introspection one finds in Buddhism, for instance, have no genuine equivalents in the West. And the suggestion that they do is born of a desperate attempt on the part of Westerners to make all religious traditions seem equally wise. They simply aren't. When a Tibetan lama talks about "nondual awareness" (Tib. rigpa) and the Pope talks about God or the Holy Spirit (or anything else), they are not talking about the same thing; nor are they operating on the same intellectual footing. The lama is using some very precise terminology (albeit terminology that has no good English equivalent) to describe what countless meditators have experienced after very refined training in methods of introspection; while the Pope is merely reiterating unjustified and unjustifiable metaphysical claims that have been passed down to Christians in the context of a culture that has failed—utterly—to find compelling alternatives to mere belief. Such alternatives have existed for millennia, east of the Bosporus. This is not to ignore the Meister Eckharts of the world, but such mystics have always been the exception in the West. And it is important to remember that, being exceptions, they have been regularly persecuted for heresy.   Mysticism, shorn of religious dogmatism, is an empirical and highly rational enterprise. Just as people do not burn their neighbors at the stake as a result of new insights in physics or biology, no one is likely to do so on the basis of genuine mysticism. Religion—especially in the West—is another matter entirely. Religious faith is a conversation stopper.   The only thing that guarantees a truly open-ended collaboration among human beings is their willingness to have their views (and resulting behavior) modified by conversation—by new evidence and new arguments. Otherwise, when the stakes are high, there is nothing to appeal to but force. If I believe that I can get to Paradise by flying a plane into a building, and I am content to believe this without evidence, then there will be nothing another person can say to dissuade me, because my leap of faith has made me immune to the powers of conversation.   "Faith" is false conviction in unjustified propositions (a certain book was written by God; we will be reunited with our loved ones after death; the Creator of the universe can hear our thoughts, etc.). "Spirituality" or "mysticism" (both words are pretty terrible, but there are no good alternatives in English) refers to any process of introspection by which a person can come to realize that the feeling he calls "I" is a cognitive illusion. The core truth of mysticism is this: It is possible to experience the world without feeling like a separate SELF in the usual sense. Such a change in the character of one's experience need not become the basis for making unsupportable claims about the nature of the universe, however.   Communism was not an attempt to erase faith. It was a new faith, albeit one that did not look beyond this life. Communism was shot through with irrationality. Stalin's repudiation of "capitalist biology" in favor of Lysenkoism (a rehash of the Lamarckian doctrine of acquired characteristics: The idea that giraffes got their long necks as a result of their ancestors striving to reach higher and higher branches) is but one example of the dogmatism that was the soul of Communism. Freethinking (that is to say rational) scientists were sent to the gulag for failing to support this ideology. Millions died from famine in both the Soviet Union and China due to their failure to implement sane agricultural practices informed by Mendelian genetics.   The kind of intolerance of faith that I am advocating in my book is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag. It is conversational intolerance. When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them—except on matters of faith. I am arguing that we can no longer afford to give faith a pass in this way. Bad beliefs should be criticized wherever they appear in our discourse—in physics, in medicine, and on matters of ethics and spirituality as well. The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive.   I have been quite surprised to find some Christians celebrating my argument against moderate religion. One Baptist minister more or less endorsed my book as the final nail in the coffin of religious moderation, claiming that I have proven that there are only two viable choices, secularism or fundamentalism. His rebuttal to my thesis was also the most surprising criticism I've encountered—he simply offered no rebuttal at all. He spoke about my book for 40 minutes on the radio, with very few distortions, and left my argument against faith entirely unchallenged—as though any process of reasoning that put faith in question would be so obviously unacceptable to his listeners that it need not even be addressed. Listening to him essentially pitch my book, while damning it implicitly, was really a through-the-looking-glass experience.   Generally speaking, however, I am continually surprised to find that even secular intellectuals believe that faith is necessary for other people. "We'll never get rid of religion. It's just too important to people," is perhaps the most common rejoinder of all. How is it that anyone thinks he knows this to be the case? Surely the first half of the 19th century was filled with people who said things like, "We'll never get rid of slavery. It's just too important for the economy...." Of course, this was a similar, seemingly sensible claim. But it was the product of intellectual and moral laziness, and it was wrong.   I am not as optimistic as I'd like to be. It is an interesting state to be in, psychologically speaking, because I feel very motivated to make the case against religion, but I don't see any real basis for hope that anything will change for the better. It seems very likely that we have spent too long in the company of bad ideas to now arrest our slide toward the brink. I hope I'm wrong about this, but I would not be surprised if the human experiment runs radically off the rails in our lifetime.   The people who have their hands upon the tiller of civilization are just not thinking, speaking, or allocating resources in the ways they must if we are to avoid catastrophe. The fact that we elect presidents who waste time on things like gay marriage, when the nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union lie unsecured (to cite only one immediate threat to our survival), is emblematic of how disastrously off course we are (it is also emblematic of the role faith plays in forcing us off course). So I am not hopeful. But still, each of us has to try to contribute positively to the world as we find it. What alternative is there? IS RELIGION DANGEROUS?   Listen! 3:03:58 PM    comment []