Wrestling with Spiritual Concepts

By Gary Berg-Cross

Spirituality and religion are often conflated. In conversation there are terms like “soul” that gets used in each, but some freethinkers are bit more comfortable believing in some spiritual concepts than religious ones like god. This was recently discussed as part of a movement from religion to a non-god spirtual realm by the Nones.  Spirituality lacks a definitive definition, but the general idea is that it is a realm of existence set apart from the ordinary (think - the natural world as shown by science) and worthy of special attention. That is, more attention should be given to these special, transcendent ideas than the mundane, material world that science gives us. In a word spirituality leads us into a supernatural realm.

As the Wikipedia entry suggests, religion and spirituality were largely synonymous for a long time. But in about the 11th century this identity began to break. Spirituality began to denote the mental aspect of life, in between the material and sensual aspects of life and pure spirit. In other words a socio-psychological distinction began to be part of "spirituality" and indeed it might be considered the more foundational piece to explain religion. William Irwin Thompson puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

 "Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather religion is the form spirituality takes in civilization."

Sure, if we can agree on what those elements of spirituality are and that religion is a construct. 

One may follow this growing distinction through the Enlightenment and into 20^th century thinking as Psychology grew as a science and discussed spirituality in more scientific ways.

After World War II spirituality & religion were further distanced as more ideas on the nature of spirituality arose.  New humanistic discourse developed, which including things like existentialism, humanist psychology, but also the import of mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions such as Buddhism. Quite a blend of efforts to talk about topics like the true self, true life, free expression, mindfulness and meditation.

I find this a bit of a strange stew and while some of the common language of spirituality is now a distance from religious dogma, it can seem arbitrary and unscientific in the hands of layman but also the spiritually inclined. It provides perhaps too much of an easy frame to experiences and thus may hinder deeper understanding. Take the idea of soul.  We can use it as shorthand for some inner complexity. We might agree that Morgan Freeman has great "soul."  But I might think of that not as some indwelling spirit, but as great presence, a calm confidence etc.  It might be OK to use the soul-shorthand, for some open discussions. Sloppy use may mislead at times. An example is a new (killer) phone App called GPS for the Soul.  What is that about - some higher level of being?  No it uses the phone to monitor "stress" levels.  How?  It measures your pulse. Here we have the physical pulse standing in as a proxy for a mental concept of stress/good living, but labeled for the soul.  Discuss children.

And all too often we start to jump from a simple word sense to a huge image via a false analogy. Consider this one about soul that uses an image of life as if we’re all at a swimming pool, with the water in the pool standing in for a Pool of Spiritual Understanding. Some are fully in the pool and exhibit a large, spiritual soul, while others are along the sides of the pool, are just dangling their feet in, and still others are sitting out of the pool on the lounge chairs, just watching and listening. Horror! Explaining complex phenomena with untestable hunches is the slippery slope of spiritual concepts that frightens me.

Giving spirit the central role is to imply that we are NOT human beings on a spiritual journey, but instead, we are spiritual beings who just happen to be on a human journey. This idea of primary spiritual beings pulls us back to this early idea of a spiritual source of life, the breath of god, for example.  We started to break away from this idea centuries ago, but keep getting tripped up in sloppy thinking and trapped in vague terms that remain in the culture like "soul".

Sure there is great mystery in the mind, and some oceanic experience of some unexplained connection to a larger reality greater than oneself, but we should not allow loose talk to cloud our understanding or explain away phenomena that we still don’t understand by labeling them too readily and believing that we are really having a meaningful conversations using them. Here I’m thinking of phrases like spirituality as a way of life, an inner path, inner peace or the overuse of the terms love, wisdom, virtue & tolerance. We see language examples from people like Deepak Chopra:

"...we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention."   Deepak Chopra 

 We may all agree on the importance and great value of concepts like love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, responsibility, harmony, and a concern for others, but are these spiritual concepts or better framed of as part of our humanity and psychology?  Give me good scientific studies of selfishness and altruism and I see the Enlightenment still progressively at work.  

Biology is the science that studies life, but nobody has a precise, general definition of life. We are still learning about the subject but I don't speak in terms of life vitality or design rather than evolution.  We do make progress by making careful and empirical distinctions even in everyday life with our common sense vocabulary to describe our experience. To paraphrase Elbert Hubbard - the spiritual (aka supernatural) is the natural not yet understood.

Talk about it in vague Buddhist terms (harmony & order etc.) and I see a good conversation but little progress. Worse yet, perhaps, is to collapse too easily into a mysterious belief that there are things unknowable or that can’t be expressed in some form of language.  There may be some, since we are cognitively limited, but I think we are not close to practical limits and do not yet want to cede a large territory to something vaguely reifiied and called spirituality.

 Some see spirituality in everything, and want to "walk in the spirit." As a reaction against naive materialism, I may have sympathy for this. But I prefer to try the path via sciences like Psychology. It's a surer path to where we'd like to go and makes for interesting conversation along the empirical way.

 Images

Mindfulness: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-mark-vernon

Bridging The Gap Between Psychology And Meditation: http://dailyheal.com/meditation-news/bridging-the-gap-between-psychology-and-meditation/

Mind control: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cultivare/2013/07/relax-neuroscience-is-not-going-to-destroy-your-faith/

Repairing Intellectual Infrastructure

By Gary Berg-Cross

Jogging around my neighborhood a few weeks ago I saw some colorful drawings marking up the road. There were deep blue marking over water lines and chartreuse for waste. There were red lines and white along with 3 digit numbers followed by a letter. On ragged asphalt road edges there were Z-like marks. Some road sides had yellow circles and circles on top of inverted half figure 5s, along with what looked like the # 28 squeezed together into an alien symbol. All glyphs of modern road repair I assumed understood by the road “literature” as infrastructure work proceeds. Although we face economic challenges it’s good to see some balanced progress after a decade neglecting our nation's roads and linking bridges. It helps us get where we need to go,

It got me thinking about the implied technical expertise that went into developing those signs so road repair crews know pretty much what energies to devote to what parts of the repair. It’s modern expertise in action operating within a system. One part of the system is the engineers who know how to deal with physical and observable problems, in this case damaged infrastructure. They can see how old patches failed and where erosion is working. This technical knowledge is connected to professional skills aimed at overcoming visible problems. Such expert knowledge and skill is amassed over time and it can be reliably applied with predictable results so that our physical infrastructure is systematically managed.

Part of making this system effective is feedback to identify problems. For example residents can see when potholes develop and can get the word out. There are now web sites to allow people to post such things. And, of course, there an empirical science to routinely keep track of a repair schedule. It’s a bit like a lawn mowing schedule, you know when it should be done. If it rains the model says to advances the schedule. If past work has been poorly done that can be identified and corrected. Going along with this is a large part of society is involved and over time has become educated enough to know the difference between a good effort and a bad one. Taken as a whole the system works so we know we need to do something to repair physical infrastructure. We may not have the resources to do all that we observe or need, but we routinely get on with some of it and have an idea of the deficit we face.

The thought occurs to me that we live in a time when our intellectual infrastructure is in disrepair and getting worse. This is less physical decay than a deficit of intellectual and educational resources which is part of an infrastructure system. Infrastructure is to structure like Metaphysics is to Physics. It is the environment in which tangible things happen. An intellectual environment might be organizational like a University, but it can also be social concepts such as are often discussed on this blog. They are infrastructures that enable, but it can seem like the intangibles and abstractions of metaphysics. This is doubly the case when the infrastructure we are talking about is about intellectual structures such as were advanced by the Enlightenment or as part of the Democratic experiment. We have real expertise in these areas, but now we seem to lack the intellectual infrastructure to apply our skills.

I worry that we may not be as aware of it or wise and expert at repairing the damage to our intellectual infrastructure. It’s a problem discussed in a new book Knowledge and Its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning by Peter Quiddington. The book is focused on University education but discusses the broader topic of how abstract ideas shape (and interact with) our social-material world and how liberal education rather than narrow training is vital to society. It’s about attitudes towards knowledge and learning, some of the traditions at the core of an intellectual society. The title captures some of that call to action of Karl Popper's earlier Open Society and its Enemies.

Open values and knowledge are very much an “infrastructure” type of view. We live in a very technical age which relies on complex models more abstract than road engineering. For example we need real expertise to understand complex things like evolution, genetics and climate change. But like roads Science, scientists and their expertise require an infrastructure such as Science education to master the complexities involved. Moreover, Science exists in a social system of values, which include the recognition and access to resources. Evolutionary research, climate change and genetics are example of areas that can generate vital knowledge needed to advance and preserve society. But in each case there have been objections to parts of their Science project. For over sixty years, US courts have struggled with the classroom conflict between science and religion. This struggle has one side for which the ultimate origins of humankind are known and have been such with scientific certainty for a long time. In that view the road to an answer needs no repair. The question is not one of evidence but of faith. Against those who believe in faith are those who seek to engineer an answer to the question with scientific fact based on verifiable experiment organized around testable theories. As a result of this conflict of views evolutionary theory, which should be front and center in high school Biology, has been kicked around and is in educational disrepair. It’s just part of the larger crumbling intellectual infrastructure we need now to advance the public good in a civil society.

Unfortunately I see few intellectual road crews society has agreed to mark up the ground for prompt infrastructure repair. It’s a debate that I hope we can conclude soon and get on with the work. There is real expertise out there to do the job.

Secular Soothing (and Inspiration)

It is said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Now we might add that they memorialize sacredly. It is understandable that Biblical quotes would find a place in memorial service such as in Tucson (“Together We Thrive: Tucson and America”). At the Tucson memorial service the closest thing to an actual minister or priest was Carlos Gonzales the Native American who gave a blessing and invocation. But was the Tucson rhetoric by President Obama and others a bit too slavishly devoted to religious language (what some call sanctimonious) or quasi-religious? It struck me that way at times although watching the early part of the memorial event, the audience behavior wasn't what you might find in a traditional church.

It was more like a religious revival or perhaps a warm up for a political rally with cheers and whistles. Obama himself felt something of this when he arrived at the lectern saying, "The decorum is a little un-nerving." And the Guardian newspaper seemed to pick up how the speeches connected the religious and political too. While praising Barack Obama for perhaps the finest speech of his presidency they noted:

“It is not just that, in performing the role of pastor to the victims of the shootings in Arizona, he shed his professorial reserve and became the empathetic head of state that everyone who crammed the National Mall on his inauguration expected him to be.”

Some saw the quoting of scripture as exactly the right tone for a largely Christian nation. It highlighted his Christian faith. And the pastoral tone was seen as statesmanlike and fatherly, which might help some people to rally around him and his policies. Perhaps for this larger reason some, such as the conservative blog Power Line attacked the atmosphere and ceremony. To them the Native American prayer along with Gonzales' comments on his Native American and Mexican ancestry were out of place. They wanted more Biblical language and concluded that the invocation "could have used more God, less Mexico, and less Carlos Gonzales."

But on the other side it wasn’t just me that saw a down side to approaching this event in a quasi-religious tone to handle intellectual, political and moral discomfort. One Guardian reader wrote:

“I so want this man to succeed, and the speech was beautiful, but please oh please will he take intense care of his own voice and not start talking like a preacher as a habit. Tony Blair couldn't resist that emotive "tug of the pulpit". It gives everyone bad memories.”

That’s why for me the part that made Obama’s a good speech was the personalized details blended with humanizing elements, such as captured in the phrase “expand our moral imaginations.." Other humanizing elements included the macro-theme of civility, listening to each other and a more balanced political debate. It linked these to the future by invoking the name of the 9 year-old Christina Green who died in Saturday's rampage and Obama’s idea that, "I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it."

As I listened I thought of Martin Luther King Jr phrase about capturing the conscience of the State. My imagination wandered to the idea of what quotes and ideas a secular, humanist president in a society that explicitly recognized the humanist values might serve a role here. How do secular humanists comfort in a time of death and grief to pull families and communities together and inspire them to move forward? To start I thought of Paul Kurtz’s 3 key humanist virtues: courage, cognition, and caring (What is Secular Humanism, 2007) which he contrasted with dependence, ignorance, or insensitivity to the needs of others. A good start and here are a few of the related ideas that came to mind as part of what one might talk about building on these.

Accomplishment and Promise

We lost talented, engaged and promising people so one might emphasize a commitment to improve human welfare in this world. The productive work that we accomplished during our lives (and the hope it inspires) helps those who remain or come after. This is comforting as we live and we should be remembered for the good we do, for as long as we do it. We should think of communities as our extended family, who are our beneficiaries. Indeed we should think of the Earth itself as our extended home and an exquisitely beautiful place whose protection is also our accomplishment and which will comfort those who come after us. This event is an opportunity to make this linkage.

Personal and Democratic Growth & Practical Action

We should be comforted by personal fulfillment, growth, and creativity. This and its promise was one of the compelling aspects of Christina Green and is seen is the still living, heroic intern Daniel Hernandez of Representative Giffords. The key to unlocking both personal and group progress and growth is within life experience. It is to face facts, to fashion realizable ends or purposes, to choose the best course of action, and to act. This is a message to convey in this teachable moment. Rather than being a Pastor-in-Chief, one might try to be a voice of Democracy and social participation. Democracy, as John Dewey noted in The Quest for Certainty, is a “way of life” that must be constantly nurtured and defended. It needs to be understood as a mode of existence, an ethical ideal that demand our active and constant attention. We should take comfort from people who maintain and support this non-dogmatic way of life. We should take comfort in life as a work in progress.

Centering on Life in this World

We should express concern for this life, as opposed to an afterlife. As Omar Khayyam, penned it in the Rubáiyát :

Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain -- This life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

We need to strengthen the commitment to making life meaningful here. The means to accomplish this are through Science, better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and conversation with those who differ with us. This means understand the world not as we would like to have it, but as science gradually helps use discover it in reality. This includes understanding our own mortality.

Ethics and Civics

I agree with Margaret Knight that “Ethical teaching is weakened if it is tied up with dogmas that will not bear examination.” Even comforting formulations that are tied up in such dogmas can be counter productive. We should stress an ethics based on critical intelligence and involved citizenry fortified by moral education. As John Dewey notes ethical knowledge is aimed at the improvement of actual conditions and moral values derive their source from reflected human experience. This is all connected to what some have called the search for viable individual, social, political and civics principles of ethical conduct. How much better we would be when we judge actions and goals based on a practical, grounded ability to enhance overall human well-being and individual responsibility. We need such ideas in these times.