10 Days Alone with the Mind

by Michael S. Russo

 

I’ve been practicing various forms of Buddhist meditation now for about 7 years, but I’ve always thought that Vipassana (aka Insight or Mindfulness Meditation) made the most intellectual sense to me. About five years ago I picked up a copy of The Artof Living by William Hart, which described the Vipassana technique taught by Burmese meditation teacher S. N. Goenka.  That led me to some of Goenka’s own discourses, which I found extremely compelling.  I later discovered that Goenka founded about two hundred centers for the teaching of Vipassana all around the world, and that one of the largest of these centers in the U.S.—the Vipassana Meditation Center—was located only a few hours away in Shelburn, Massachusetts.

For three years, I’ve been trying to find the 12 days needed to do one of the retreats offered by this Center, but my work schedule always got in the way.  Then one of my colleagues, Janet, happened to tell me that she had a wonderful Buddhist retreat experience at—you guessed it—the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburn, Massachusetts.   I promised her that I would commit myself to doing a Vipassana retreat the first chance I got.

This semester I was on sabbatical, so it seemed like the ideal time to do the retreat thing, if ever I  was going to.  I certainly experienced some degree of trepidation at the thought of having to meditate continuously for 10 straight days (the hour and a half I spend at my local zendo once a week is normally more than challenging enough for me), but I signed up online for the first available course that they had, which happed to be May 1-12.

What impressed me most about the ethos of the Vipassana Centers started by Goenka is that the programs they offer are completely free.   Donations from senior students pay for the retreats of newbies like me.   Those same senior students volunteer to act as servers for those on retreat, providing meals and keeping everything running smoothly.   The goal is to allow anyone who is interested to experience intense meditative practice without having to worry at all about mundane concerns.   It is a testament to the sincerity and idealism of Goenka and his teachers that they are willing to offer the dharma for free when so many other places are charging abundantly for similar experiences.

I arrive at The Vipassana Meditation Center at about 2pm on May 1^st, after a leisurely drive from New York.  The place was attractively situated amidst rolling wooded hills and was extremely well maintained.  I was shown to my room, which thankfully was a single, and I couldn’t have been happier with it.  The main house, the dining room, the dormitories and the meditation hall exuded a kind of orderly tranquility that certainly is conducive to meditative practice.    The sexes are strictly separated, so I can only speak about the men’s facilities, but I’m assuming that the female quarters are similar to those of the men. 

One thing that was evident to me immediately was that this was a place that was in serious expansion mode.  Hundreds of meditators come each month to do the ten day meditation course that I was there for.   Apparently, enough of these meditators liked what they experienced enough to provide millions of dollars to upgrade the facilities.  While I was there, the Center was building a teachers’ house, a second women’s dormitory and finishing work on their new pagoda.  Again, this growth appears to be a testament to the positive benefits that participants have experienced through the meditation technique practiced at the Center. 

Before embarking on ten days of “noble silence,” I had the opportunity to chat with some of my fellow male meditators.  I was struck by the fact that almost two-thirds of the men that were present seemed to be in their mid-twenties (the rest averaged in age from about 30-70).  The ones I chatted with seemed bright, enthusiastic, and sincere.  Some had done numerous Vipassana retreats before this one; others were coming for their first experience, inspired by the benefits reported by trusted friends and family members.   

After chatting for about an hour, we were asked to proceed to the meditation hall, where our retreat would officially begin and all conversation and contact with one another would end.  Two preliminary requirements had to be gotten out of the way, before the course could begin.  First, we all had to agree to stay for the full ten day period of the course and to strictly abide by the code of discipline (sila) that is at the heart of all Buddhist practice.  This included:

1.       abstaining from killing any being

2.       abstaining from stealing

3.       abstaining from all sexual activity

4.       abstaining from telling lies

5.       abstaining from all intoxicants

These rules actually make considerable sense if one considers that the goal of a Vipassana retreat like this one is to purify the mind, and one’s mind can hardly be purified if one is going around stealing or lying.  In fact, it’s fairly easy to keep all these rules while on the retreat,  though admittedly some would be rather hard to put into strict practice in one’s normal life.

Participants also have to agree to follow the Vipassana method taught by Goenka and refrain from any other form of worship or spiritual practice during the ten days of the course.   Finally, each individual also has to agree to abide by the fairly strict schedule set up by the Center, which includes about 9 hours of group and individual meditation per day:

4:00 am                        Morning wake-up bell 

4:30-6:30 am              Meditate in the hall or in your room 

6:30-8:00 am              Breakfast break 

8:00-9:00 am              Group meditation in the hall

9:00-11:00 am            Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions 

11:00-12:00 noon      Lunch break 

12noon-1:00 pm        Rest and interviews with the teacher 

1:00-2:30 pm              Meditate in the hall or in your room 

2:30-3:30 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

3:30-5:00 pm              Meditate in the hall or in your own room

5:00-6:00 pm              Tea break 

6:00-7:00 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

7:00-8:15 pm              Teacher's Discourse in the hall 

8:15-9:00 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

9:00-9:30 pm              Question time in the hall 
        9:30 pm               Retire to your own room; Lights out 

Each person attending the course probably would find some difficulties with different aspects of the schedule. Certainly, the amount of continuous meditation required would discourage all but the most determined individuals from even attempting the course. Waking up at 4am is also no great pleasure. One also has to contend with the having no real meal after 12:00 noon (new students get a tea break at 5pm, where they can eat some fruit, but senior students can only have water after their noon lunch). I personally didn’t find abstaining from real meals at night too difficult, but I know that for some of my fellow meditators this sort of abstinence may have been a bit challenging.

The meditation schedule itself varied very little during the course of the ten days. At exactly 4am the gongs chimed to wake us up and we were expected to be meditating by 4:30 sharp either in the meditation hall or in our rooms. There were three formal group sittings each day that lasted about an hour. Each sitting began and ended with an audio chant from Goenka and instructions on how to proceed. Hearing Goenka’s voice for the first time reminded me a bit of Bella Lugosi and I had to refrain from chuckling at the thought of that. I personally found all the chanting and the repetitious instruction a bit tedious at times, but I know that many of my fellow meditators got much more out of these than I did.

 At the end of the evening, we were able to relax (a bit anyway), while watching a video of Goenka’s daily dharma talk. Unlike the audio instructions, these dharma talks are actually very inspiring and I could understand why so many people feel that no one else could teach the method of Vipassanaa quite like Goenka. Although he looked a bit like an older Jonathan Winters, Goenka’s teaching method is actually quite good. At the end of each talk, I felt I understood exactly why I was doing what I was doing each day and how it fit in with the teaching of the Buddha.

For the first four days, meditation practice basically focused on what Buddhists call samadhi—attempting to achieve some degree of mental concentration. For the first three days all we did was focus on the experience of air flowing in and out of the nostrils (or “no-strils,” in Goenka’s audio instructions). On the fourth day, there was a liberation of sorts, when we actually started the practice of Vipassana per se by moving from the rings of the nostrils to the area between the nostrils and the upper lip. The idea was to focus on a very small area of the body and try to detect as much sensation as possible in that area.

 By day two I thought I would go out of my mind from all the meditation I was doing and the thought that I still had eight days to go. My knees were also killing me from sitting on a cushion in the half-lotus position for far longer than my body was used to. I was determined, however, to tough it out, no matter how crazy the monkey mind got or no matter how severe the pain in my knees was. But by day four, I knew that there was no possible way that I was going to be able to remain absolutely still and not shift my position on the cushion at all during the formal meditation sessions. This would be required beginning on day five. So I asked the assistant teacher if I could move to a chair, and he agreed.

The practice of Vipassana itself was actually quite interesting. Beginning on day five we began to scan our bodies “from head to toe; from toe to head.” The idea was to become aware of sensation in every part of the body. At first I was a bit dubious about this practice, because I could only feel sensation in about half of my body parts. But by day seven I was feeling sensation in every part of my body (although my ears, surprisingly, were trouble throughout the ten days of the course).  
It might seem somewhat ridiculous to spend so much time searching for sensations in the body, but this is the heart of the practice of Vipassana or mindfulness practice. As one becomes aware of sensation, one also becomes aware of the most important insights attained by the Buddha:

 

• Dukka (suffering): that attachment to pleasant sensations in the body or aversion to unpleasant sensations is the cause of all of our misery in life. If we can just treat all these sensations with equanimity, liberation from suffering occurs naturally.
• Anicca (impermanence): sensations arise and fall away. There is nothing permanent about any sensation, so there’s no use clinging to them as “mine” or “belonging to me”. This leads one to understand the basic impermanence of everything in reality, including oneself. 
• Annata (no self): there is no permanently enduring, independent self. This realization is the highest wisdom a Buddhist can achieve and is the key to ultimate liberation.

 

I have to confess that there were times I thought that I would go crazy with all the meditation we had to do. As Goenka predicted in his video dharma talks, days two and six were particularly difficult for me. By the end of day two, and after 18 hours of meditation on the breath, it began to dawn on me that I still had eight full days to go (believe me, that realization was not a happy prospect for me, especially given the pain that I was experiencing in my knees each time I sat on the cushion to meditate). But there were also moments of peacefulness and serenity that I’ve never experienced before in my life that enabled me to deal with the arduousness of the experience. 

 

On days 9 and 10, while I was sitting in my 3 x 4 foot meditation cell in the new pagoda, I even experienced jhana states that I couldn’t even imagine while doing my less intensive zen practice. My normal practice is one of dealing with the aversion that the meditation produces in me; the idea that meditation could also produce extremely pleasurable states was certainly not part of my own reality as a meditator. Of course, once I experienced the total absorptive quality of these states, it was almost impossible for me to treat then with the equanimity that was expected. But that, I suppose, was a good lesson for me too.

 

Although I was relieved on day 10 when “noble silence” ended and I could converse during certain periods with my fellow meditators, there was definitely a part of me that misses the focused atmosphere that continuous silence produces. Some of the younger guys—the meditation hot shots, who unlike me, had absolutely no trouble sitting on a cushion for hour upon hour without moving—couldn’t wait to talk with one another about their experiences on the retreat . Surprisingly, I think that I would have been perfectly content to have continued the silent atmosphere that pervaded the Center for the previous nine days. It was certainly interesting, however, to hear the personal stories of my fellow meditators, all of whom struck me as even more sincere and intelligent than I had initially thought. That there were so many young people who were willing to put aside their normal lives to practice intensive meditation for so long a period also gave me hope for the future of our species. 

 

As for what I got out of my own Vipassana experience, that’s difficult to say at this point. I certainly think that the retreat pushed my own meditative practice into a more focused and serious direction than had been the case before. Several people told me that I seemed much calmer after the retreat. If that was indeed the case, it was a transient effect and didn’t last all that long.  

 

In the end, however, I was just happy to know that I could make it through an experience like this without going completely insane. Being totally alone with one’s mind is an experience that most 21st century people try to avoid at all costs. I may not have made friends with my own” monkey mind”, but, after 10 days alone with the old fellow, it was certainly nice to know that the two of us can get along well together under the right circumstances. And that insight alone made ten days of pain and suffering well worth it for me.

 

___________________

Dr. Michael S. Russo is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Molloy College in New York, the manager of The Sophia Project, an online repository of educational resources in Philosophy, and the author of That's Right: An Introduction to Ethical Theory.  He can be reached at mrusso@molloy.edu.

On the Life-Debasing Sensibilities of the True Believers

• Fanatical Muslims kill thousands in their attack on the World Trade Center in New York because God wills them to strike fears into the heart of the infidel.
• A pious Christian murders an abortion doctor in Kansas because he was convinced that God wanted him to revenge the lives of the unborn taken by the practice of abortion.
• Devout Jews drive Muslims from their homelands on the West Bank and Gaza Strip because they believe that God has granted them the rights to their lands.

And now two brothers from Chechnya, Tamerlan and Dzhohar Tsarnev, caused mayhem and panic in Boston after exploding two bombs at the Boston Marathon.  The older brother, Tamerlan, age 26, had clearly been on the road to religious fanaticism for some time. The younger, Dzhohar, age 19, appears to have been influenced by his brother’s religious views, although by all accounts he was a fairly assimilated American.  Whatever their specific motivations might have been, it is clear that religion played a huge role in inspiring their rampage. 

There are those who would argue that the religious beliefs that propelled these two to kill innocent human beings represent a perverse form of Islam.  But in fact, the sacred book for all Muslims, The Koran, has over 100 verses calling for the faithful to go to war against infidels.  And this includes the following:

"And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]... but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful.   And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah." (Koran 2:191-193)

Of course, Christian and Jews have no grounds to be too smug.  The Old Testament is filled with passages calling for genocide against non-believers and acts of violence against those who violate God’s law.  And the New Testament contains passages that have been used by Christians to justify sexism, racism, and homophobia to this very day (not to mention inspiring several crusades, a fairly nasty inquisition, and centuries of slavery). 

The problem with religious belief in general is that at times it can be used as a kind of crutch to cover up the fears, anxieties, and insecurities that are part and parcel of the human condition.  Sickness, suffering, old age, and death are our lot in life.  And no one likes to think that the misery we experience is pointless.  So some people turn to religion to provide them with a soothing narrative to help put their suffering into some kind of meaningful content. 

With his faith to support him, the believer doesn’t have to worry about death any longer, because, as long as he remains faithful to God’s law, he will be rewarded with an eternity of pleasure with God in heaven (rather like your Disney vacation extended forever, but without all the humid weather, endless lines, and mobs of annoying children at every turn).  This leads to a kind of inner peace, but it’s an illusionary one: we can forget for a few moments at least just how wretched life is, but in the end we can never actually escape the reality of our own human contingency and finitude.  As Kierkegaard noted, despair is an inevitable part of our human experience and affects the believer just as much as it does the non-believer. 

The religious fanatic, however, takes his faith to another level entirely than the ordinary believer.  The fanatic has the kind of crystal clear certainty about God’s will and how he should live his life that admits absolutely no questioning or doubt.  In a Twitter feed, Dzhohar Tsarnev, the younger of the two Boston marathon bombers, wrote the following:

I kind of like religious debates.  Just knowing what other people believe is interesting and then completely crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.

Notice that Dzhohar didn’t say that he enjoys religious debates because it helps him to become more sympathetic to views than are different from his own.  He enjoys them because he gets a thrill from “crushing” his opponents.  And notice also that he describes his opponents’ positions as “beliefs” (something subjective, capricious, subject to error) and his own as “facts” (objective, certain, and infallible).

The religious fanatic’s certainty leads him to view the beliefs of all those with whom he disagrees as a kind of heresy—a rejection of God’s eternal law and a violation of the moral order that He has established on earth.  This makes it much easier, I suppose, to demean one’s opponents and to put them in the category of unredeemable heretic, apostate, or infidel.  It also makes it easier to kill them when you need to, because your opponents become, not just those who have a different perspective on the truth, but rather those who are activity working against God’s sublime plans for mankind (the establishment of the Kingdom or of sharia law on earth, for example).

But this denigration of the non-believer alone doesn’t fully account for the propensity of some fanatics to engage in acts of violence against those with whom they disagree.  I’ve met plenty of religious fanatics in my time, but none of them, at least to my knowledge, has ever caused serious physical harm to another human being.  They may foam up at the mouth during an argument about religion, but they probably aren’t going to kill you because you disagree with them.    There’s something more at work in the psychological make-up of the “true believer” that enables him to move from disagreeing strenuously with his opponents to wanting to see his opponents maimed or killed.   

And that something more is the kind of life-denying sensibility that is an inevitable part of all religious belief, but which is magnified almost infinitely in the minds of fanatics.

Certainly I think that all religious belief contains within itself some degree of life-denial.  The believer—whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim—sees his ultimate end separate from his life in this world.  Earthly existence, at its best, is an imperfect reflection of that eternal life to which the believer aspires.  At its worst, it becomes a “veil of tears” that we are forced to suffer through on our way to our true home with God in heaven.

By focusing on the next life, the believer inevitably is forced to downplay or ignore what’s going on in this world.  The believer, for example, doesn’t have to worry about the polar ice caps melting and what this might mean for future generations, because his focus is on the next world. He need not concern himself with creating a more just and social order here, because the very injustices that he experiences will provide the justification for his rewards later. 

But, though there’s a degree of life-denial in all religious belief, for the religious fanatic this life-denial takes on a pathological form.  It becomes not just life-denial, but life-denigration.  For the fanatic, any sense of pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction from this life that one derives diminishes the focus that ought to be placed on the next life.  So the fanatic is forced to view earthly existence as something ugly, sordid, and unsavory in order to magnify the qualities of the world to come.  For Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Kansas becomes something hideous to be fled from, because it makes that “somewhere over the rainbow” where she really longs to be all that much more desirable.  The only difference between Dorothy and the religious fanatic is that the fanatic never has the opportunity to realize that there really is “no place like home,” whereas Dorothy is wise enough by the end of her adventures to eventually come to understand that fact.

Like all human beings, the religious fanatic has a biological drive to try to derive as much physical pleasure from life as possible.  But the more he enjoys things like food, drink, sex, and even the higher pleasures of friendship and family life, the more tortured he becomes, because he views his natural desires as a kind of moral weakness.  This tension probably exists in all religious fanatics.  It’s interesting to note that the bombers of the World Trade Center couldn’t stop themselves from going to a strip club and drinking to excess before committing their atrocities.  One can only imagine that the contempt they felt for themselves for giving into such physical pleasures must have provided fuel for the murderous acts that they later engaged in.

Lest anyone think that I am attacking all forms of religious belief as bordering on life-denigration, let me assure you that this is most certainly not my position.  Just as I’ve met more than a few religious fanatics during my many years working for the Catholic Church, I’ve also met many devout men and women who are as life-affirming as you can possibly be.  These are people who sincerely believe that God’s kingdom is already at hand and that religious faith is meant to be lived out fully in this world.  Such individuals are deeply committed to making the world a better place and see absolutely no incompatibility between their love of life and their love for God.

But I also think that, to the extent that there is any kind of life-denying message in the teachings of organized religion, we will be providing a breeding ground for those warped individuals who think it necessary to demonstrate their devotion to God by wreaking havoc on the world.  In this sense, people like Tamerlan and Dzhohar Tsarnev should be viewed as victims of a perverse and unhealthy worldview that has been shaped by life-denigrating tendencies that exist in most of our major religions. It’s only when we begin to acknowledge that religious faith and life-affirmation, far from being incompatible, are actually two essential components of a healthy spiritual life that we will even begin to address the underlying causes of acts of terrorism like the one we just witnessed in Boston.

This Being Unto Death

I’m dying…Did you know that?

Don’t get too upset about it: you’re dying too. We’re all dying. In fact from the very moment we’re born on this planet, our lives have been a steady, inexorable progression to the grave. We’re literally “being unto death”—to use the memorable terminology of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger.

I know what you’re thinking right now: “That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Who doesn’t know that they’re going to die?”

But it isn’t really obvious at all to most people. If you’re elderly, or sickly, or have had a close friend or a family member die tragically, then maybe you have appreciation for the fact that you are a being unto death. But if you are a typical college student at the peak of your physical development, you probably only understand death in the abstract. Death for most twenty- year-olds—actually, for most people regardless of their age—is something that happens to someone else: to Aunt Sally who had cancer, or Grandma who was 90, or to that starving child in the commercial about Africa.

But you certainly don’t think it’s going to happen to you…not for a very, very long while anyway.

When you’re in your twenties, the last thing you want to do is spend your time thinking about death. There are wild parties to go to, romances to be had, careers to be started. Who has time to think about death? When you’re young, you’re also convinced that you’re indestructible. That’s why most twenty-year-olds are almost always reckless jerks on the road. They don’t ever stop to think that getting behind the wheel drunk and driving 80 miles an hour on the expressway is the perfect recipe for swift demise.

Believe it or not, I was young once too. At one time in my life I too thought that I would live forever. I used to laugh at old people and their assorted ailments. I remember once working a security job when I was a freshman in college and was teamed up with a 60 year old former cop named Lenny. Lenny would have to run to the bathroom every half hour or so and I’d inevitably make some wise crack about his old man bowels. I remember quite well, though, what he used to say to me: “Just you wait, Mike, one day you’ll get old and you’ll be crapping bee bees all day long too.”

Thankfully, I’m not crapping bee bees yet. But as I pass through my fourth decade on this planet, I also am quite aware that I am no longer that young, 130 pound smart ass who never gave a moment’s thought to sickness or old age. The hair is definitely thinning out now, and strands of grey are starting to appear out of nowhere. When I was in my twenties, I was so emaciated that I used to drink weight-gain formula that I bought at a fitness store, just so my ribs wouldn’t stick out quite so much. Now I have to watch everything that I eat and work out almost every day to forestall the inevitability of middle-aged sag.

The first time I was aware that I was no longer a young person was when I was on the subway with a group of college students for a class we were having in Manhattan. We were all hanging onto a pole in the train car, and I happened to glance down at our hands all bunched together. And then I saw it: that brittle, veiny, craggy old hand in a sea of soft, collagen-rich, wrinkle-free hands. There was no mistaking it: I was no longer young.

So you see, I really am going to die. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but relatively soon. And I can’t deceive myself about that fact any more the way I could when I was younger. The old man hands that I stare at every time I type something on the computer won’t ever let me forget that fact.

And, when I die, I tell you, that the universe and everything in it will die with me. What good does it do me that humanity lives on if I am to be no more? When I die, my art dies with me; when I die, my words disappear as if into thin air; when I die, all the hopes and dreams of a lifetime are buried in the grave with me.

Or is there some other state that I can hope for after death that might take away some of the bitter sting of human mortality? Certainly thinkers much more profound than I am have developed fairly persuasive arguments for the immortality of the soul that should not be cynically dismissed. But you and I must also acknowledge that all claims to a life beyond this one are matters of hope and faith, and may very well amount to little more than the desperate longings of fearful minds.

Fortunately, while I’m alive I have philosophy, which Plato in the Republic so aptly called a “preparation for death.” He meant that philosophy prepares the soul to live out its existence after death in an incorporeal state. But I think that, when we consider philosophy a preparation for death, we mean something much more than this. We mean that philosophy places death front and center as an object of contemplation in order to teach us what’s most important about our transient human condition.

The acknowledgment that I’m going to die in fairly short order forces me to think seriously about the way I am living out the precious time I have on this planet. Am I living a worthy life, a noble life, a virtuous life? Am I leaving the world a better place than I found it? As the Quaker Stephen Grellet once put it, “I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good that I can do, therefore, let me do it now. For I shall not pass this way again.” Am I, in fact, doing the good I can while I am here? Or am I just adding to the sum total of human misery, inflicting my own nasty emotional baggage onto others around me?

I’m dying and so are you, but it’s nothing to get morbid about. In fact, you just might find that contemplating on death now and then helps put our human existence into true perspective, sifting out what is really important in life from what is utterly frivolous and insignificant. And the inevitability of death teaches us, above all, that our fragile human lives are the most valuable gift imaginable and ought to be fully cherished each and every moment, for …

We shall not pass this way again.

In Defense of Augustinian Pessimism

In general, I think the TV sitcom is a fairly stupid form of entertainment.  In 22 minutes, there’s some silly conflict, a happy resolution of the conflict, and the amazing advancement in insight and moral behavior that inevitably occurs at the end of each episode. 

The one exception I make to my sitcom antipathy is that old standby of 1990’s comedy—Seinfeld.  What is it that sets this show apart from more banal sitcoms, you may be wondering?  Well, the creators of Seinfeld—Jerry Seinfeld himself and Larry David—were keen philosophers of human nature.  They understood that, for the most part, our characters are fixed, that human beings keep making the same mistakes all the time, and that true personal growth and transformation rarely, if ever, occurs in the real world.  “No hugging, no learning,” was Larry David’s philosophical approach to the show, and this is precisely what makes it so profound.  In the last episode of the series, the four main characters actually wind up in prison, and they still learn nothing from their experiences.  We are almost guaranteed that when they finish serving their prison terms, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer will immediately return to the cynical narcissistic behavior that got them into so much trouble in the first place.

 

I have no doubt that, if St. Augustine were living in the 1990s, he would have appreciated the wisdom of Seinfeld too.  You see, Augustine was convinced that the effects of original sin and the force of vicious habits over long periods of time created a situation in which men and women may know what the right way to behave is, but they wind up time and again doing what is wrong anyway.   For example, a college sophomore who is on a very tight budget because of school expenses, knows damn well that she shouldn’t spend the little money she has buying a new pair of stylish leather boots, especially since she already has five pairs of boots in her closet already.  She goes to the mall with her friends determined only to look, but years of rampant consumerism and the rush she gets from buying new things undermine her fragile resolve.  By the time she leaves the mall, she has spent $200 on a new pair of boots that she didn’t actually need, and now is wondering whether she is going to find the funds to pay for gas to get to school.

In real life, this happens all the time: we resolve to begin eating better, but can’t resist the urge to wolf down Big Macs three or four times a week; we know we should not drink to excess, but wind up binge drinking almost every weekend; we promise ourselves that we will be kinder to our parents, but always seem to get into fights with them over the silliest things.

Augustine saw nothing strange in this pattern of behavior.  He was convinced that human nature was so corrupted that one could know darn well what the right thing to do is, but feel compelled to do what is wrong anyway.  His favorite quote was from Ovid:  “Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor.” (I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way.)

What’s so radical about Augustine’s approach to human behavior is that it represents a complete and total break from the classical tradition of which he’s technically a part.  The adherents of all of the great schools of antiquity—the Neo-Platonists, the Peripathetics, the Academics, the Cynics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics—basically accepted the principle that, if a person knew what was right and desired to do what was right, right moral behavior was virtually guaranteed.   But Augustine clearly understood that this was an overly simplistic way of understanding human nature.  He knew this because in his own life he had troubles committing to do the good that he desired to do (“Lord, make me chaste and continent, but not yet”) and because, as a priest and bishop he encountered individuals who were sincere in their desires to live out the Christian faith, but who fell back into sin time and again.

And this is what makes Augustine seem so modern and relevant in the 21^st century compared to his more idealistic counterparts in antiquity.  We understand today just how nearly impossible it is to overcome addictions.  We also have a much greater understanding today of those factors—environmental, psychological, and genetic—that often interfere with the free exercise of the will.

In this sense, I consider Augustine to be the first modern thinker in the West.  His understanding of human nature may indeed be pessimistic, but it’s also extremely realistic.  If you don’t believe me, just try this simple exercise:  commit yourself for one whole week not to lie or gossip for any reason.  See how long you succeed in carrying out this intention.

At the end of the exercise, you too may find yourself beginning to question just how free you are to do the good you desire.  And that’s exactly the sort of humility that Augustine claims is needed, if we are ever to begin to look outside of ourselves for a solution to our human problems. 

We Are the Last Men

 

A recent study of religious attitudes and beliefs shows that 20% of Americans describe themselves as having no religious affiliations at all (up from only 8% in 1990).  This includes people who may be vaguely spiritual, but who have no interest in being part of any organized religion, as well as those who describe themselves as agnostics or atheists.   More telling still, one-third of men and women under the age of 30 claim to be “nothing in particular” when it comes to religious affiliation.

What accounts for this sudden surge in the number of people who describe themselves as having no connection to any religion?  Organized religion itself is undoubtedly to blame.  In the past decade we have seen leaders from all the major religious groups in the United States engage in financial improprieties, abuses of power, sexual transgressions with minors, and every manor of hypocrisy imaginable.  Such behavior has most certainly tainted the “brand” of organized religion in the eyes of many Americans. 

The study also indicates that the association of organized religion with a conservative political agenda that at times can come across as racist, sexist, and homophobic has apparently also played a role in the decline of organized religion.  40% of self-identified liberals, for example, claim to have no religion (compared to 9% of conservatives).  This may also be why younger Americans, who tend to be fairly liberal on social issues, make up a much larger percentage of the religiously unaffiliated than older Americans.

While it is clear that organized religion is not going away any time soon, when the youngest, best educated, and most upwardly mobile members of a society turn away from organized religion—as appears to be happening in the United States—that doesn’t bode very well for the future of religion in this country. 

It’s interesting that this trend away from organized religion was predicted in the 19^th century by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  In language that is as provocative today as it was in his own time, Nietzsche dramatically declared that “God is dead.”   In The Gay Science, Nietzsche has his “madman” run to the marketplace, shouting, “I seek God, I seek God,” only to be mocked by atheists in the crowd.  In response to their taunts, the madman proclaims the following:

“Where is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”  (The Gay Science, 125).
 

It should be noted that Nietzsche was not claiming that God didn’t exist—although he certainly believed that.  What he was trying to say is that the hypocrisy and fundamental dishonesty of organized religion would eventually lead to the death of religious belief itself.  God is dead because religion is no longer able to provide order, meaning and value to our lives.  We are moving, he believed, from a religious era to a post-religious one, and we’ve found nothing yet to replace our belief in God. 

Or have we?  In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes what he calls, the “last man”.  “There will come a time,” he writes, “when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas!  There will come a time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I show you THE LAST MAN.”

In the absence of the meaning and order provided by organized religion, the last man strives to avoid suffering and struggle and lives for comfort and pleasure.  In the end, the last man is actually closer to a beast of the field than a human being, and about as far removed from the Superman—the endpoint of human evolution for Nietzsche—as one can possibly get. When the concept of God dies, when the Churches become his tombs, Nietzsche believes that the nihilism that results provides fertile ground for the propagation of decadent last men and women.

In proclaiming the death of God, the madman in the Gay Science admits that he has “come too early”—that the world is not ready for him.  This was Nietzsche’s problem as well.  But Nietzsche’s prophetic views on the end of organized religion, and what that fact means for human society, seems to be coming true in our own day and age.  If the study cited above is accurate, God may not be completely dead yet in the United States (as he is in most of Northern Europe), but he is certainly on life support.  And, in the absence of a new generation of Superman, what we have in our own society is a nation of the kind of “last men” that Nietzsche describes so wonderfully in Zarathustra. 

Like Nietzsche’s last men, we have become a people that no longer is capable of lofty ideals, a nation of individuals who see no value in struggling to improve ourselves and who are content instead to swill cheap beer on our lazy boys, watching reality TV as we graze on an endless supply of artery clogging snacks.  The planet is literally choking on the shit that is emitted from our cars, our smoke-stacks, and our energy-intensive homes, but as long as we have our daily pleasures, what difference does it make to us?

Nietzsche believed that out of the nihilism caused by the death of God a new race of Supermen would emerge to create new values and ideals.  I’m not so confident that a Superman will appear in our own society any time soon.  And, if he did, I have no doubts that the last men would kill him off the way that other morally superior human beings, like Jesus or Gandhi, have been killed off in the past. 

No, we’re definitely not ready for the arrival of a Superman.  We’ll have to content ourselves to living in a world without God and without any transcendent values.  The consolation is that when the end comes for us last men, we probably won’t even notice it.  And even if we do, we’ll be far too absorbed by the endless pleasures provided by Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashian sisters to give a damn, anyway.

Why Socrates Still Matters

The first time I encountered Socrates was when I was 21 years old. I was a freshman at Fordham University, and like all freshmen, I was required to take an introductory course in philosophy to fulfill my general education requirements,

In all honesty, I didn’t have a clue about what philosophy was. I had come from a fairly conservative Catholic high school—a prep seminary, actually—where we were taught to accept the teachings of the Catholic Church without much questioning at all. I had learned everything there was to know about the Old and New Testaments and the Christian doctrine, but philosophy was one thing that the good fathers who taught me seemed to have little use for.

In fact, when I told the priests at my high school that I was going to a Jesuit college, they responded with actual alarm. I remember one of my teachers telling me before I graduated, “Just be careful that you don’t lose your faith, Michael. Those Jesuits will teach you to QUESTION EVERYTHING!.”

So there I was back in 1982, a freshman in my Introduction to Philosophy class, not really knowing what philosophy was, but having the suspicion that I was going to be corrupted in some way by my encounter with it. When I met my instructor, a young adjunct instructor named Ed, who seemed far too cool to be a professor, I became even more concerned. “You’ve been living in a world where you accept everything as true based upon your upbringing, your faith, or your own biases,” I remember him saying during our first class. “But I’m going to teach you how to challenge your presuppositions about reality and see if they hold up in the light of reason.”

Ed’s plan for the class was fairly straightforward. We were going to be reading what were known as the Socratic dialogues of Plato—those texts that Ed said best represented the actual thought of the philosopher Socrates. And the reason for this was simple: Everything you needed to learn about the methods of philosophy, Ed maintained, you could learn from understanding the approach that Socrates took to the discipline. And that approach could be summed up as “QUESTION EVERYTHING.”

So the priests in my high school were right, I thought. One week in a Jesuit college and they were already trying to brainwash me into abandoning my faith!

The first text we had to read in the class was the Apology, Socrates’ famous speech in defense of his philosophical way of life. Despite my reservations, I found myself being captivated by the person of Socrates, who certainly was not afraid to poke fun at his accusers, even though his life was hanging in the balance. But what impressed me most about Socrates was his dogged determination to discover The Truth about the right way to live, no matter what the consequences. So he spent his life cross-examining those who “claimed to know”—the so-called experts—only to discover that he was far wiser than they were, because at least he realized how little he actually knew.

And this, I believe, is the key to Socrates’ continued relevance 2,500 years after his death.

We live in a world in which everyone claims to know The Truth. All around us we have experts telling us what we need to eat in order to be healthy, what policies we need to support in order to put our country back on the right path, what doctrines we have to believe in order to be saved, and so on. What Socrates teaches us is that we shouldn’t simply accept the opinions of those who claim to know, but rather we should be involved in a life-long process of questioning the so-called experts to see if what they say actually holds up to reason. Sometimes the opinions of the experts will be right, but quite often, we’ll discover that the experts, to put it frankly, are full of shit—that they know even less than we do, but their pride prevents them from admitting their woeful ignorance.

The example of Socrates also teaches us the importance of humility in our quest for the truth. Recognizing the limitations of our own knowledge is a first step to being open to the possibility of actually moving in the direction of the truth. Like Socrates, we may not grasp this truth completely in our own lifetimes, but our lives, like his, will be much better spent for making the effort. And we will certainly become just a little bit wiser as a result.

When my first philosophy class ended, I discovered that the fears of my high school teachers were totally unfounded. My encounter with Socrates in that class didn’t destroy my faith, but rather, helped me to sort through the teachings I had grown up with to see which actually made sense and which were the product of irrational superstition. My encounter with Socrates also began my life-long love affair with the discipline of philosophy that has enriched my life in ways that I could hardly have imagined while I was sitting through Introduction to Philosophy.

I may know less about the really important issues in life than I did as a freshman in college (I knew everything back then). But now at least, I take consolation from Socrates that the recognition of my own ignorance may one day prove to be the source of my future wisdom. 

The Argument Against Specialization

In a recent article in the New York Times, Adam Davidson warns that in our current economic climate, the competition for decent paying jobs will become more intense than ever, not only for blue collar workers, but also for many college graduates: 

Until now, a B.A. in any subject was a near-guarantee of at least middle-class wages.  But today, a quarter of college graduates make less than the typical worker without a bachelor’s degree….[A] college degree [therefore] is no longer the guarantor of a good job.  While graduates from top universities are still likely to get a good job no matter what their major is…graduates from less-exulted schools are going to be judged on what they know.  To compete for jobs on a national level, they should be armed with skills that emerging industries need, whether technical…or not.

Davidson goes on to say that those who earn non-specialized degrees at universities—think English, history, and philosophy majors—will ultimately be vying with one another for the same sorts of low-paying, low-level management or retail jobs that are unlikely to pay them enough to live as well as their parents did.  The implication here is that those students who foolishly decide to pursue humanities degrees at most American colleges and universities are basically wasting their tuition dollars by not choosing majors that would enable them to become more economically competitive. 

Unfortunately, I think that Davidson is correct in his assessment of the prospects for the average student with a humanities degree.  But the reason for this is lies in the erroneous perception that workers today need highly specialized skills in order to succeed in most fields. 

Until quite recently, one could graduate with a degree in classics or English literature, for example, and do quite well in any number of fields—business, law, entertainment, government, medicine, etc.  A traditional liberal arts degree from a respectable college assured employers that college graduates had the kinds of oral and written communications and  critical thinking skills, and cognitive flexibility to make a valuable contribution to just about any branch of industry.  That’s why—up until recently at least—you could find liberal arts majors running huge multinational companies and no one would think twice about it.  Today, because of hyper-specialization both in higher education as well as in most industries, that is much less likely to happen.

And that’s a shame too, because I believe that we are already beginning to see the limitations and liabilities of having hyper-specialized individuals in positions of authority in business and government.  It was, in fact, the most specialized sorts of individuals who were absolutely certain, based upon the most sophisticated technological evidence, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—the argument for a war that has costs tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.  It was another specialized technocrat, Donald Rumsfeld, who assured us—again incorrectly—that such a war could be won with limited costs and casualties.  And it was a group of the most hyper-specialized men and women imaginable—those who had the kinds of skill sets needed to understand how derivatives worked—who nearly brought down the entire U.S. economy in 2008.  The examples go on and on.

In The Republic, the philosopher Plato argued that true civilizations can only occur when you have some degree of specialization—different people becoming proficient in various skills and sharing or trading the fruits of their expertise.  This leads to the creation of wealth and the creature comforts that all of us have come to expect in advanced societies.

But Plato also believed that to create a just, orderly, and harmonious society you needed to have individuals leading it who had a broad enough training in all the arts and sciences—and especially philosophy—to know and do the Good.  In other words, Plato thought it was fine and dandy for low level business people to be specialists, but a political society could only work properly if it was led by people with the kind of expansive moral vision and depth of understanding that comes from having what is essentially a humanities background. 

I certainly think that we’d be better off as a society if our elected officials were people who had read Cicero and Thomas Moore rather than sterile law texts; if our top educators spent their time absorbed in reading Jane Austen and Edward Gibbons rather than combing through data bases in search of the latest shallow ideas of whatever educational theorist happens to be in vogue at the time; and if our business leaders were men and women who were as interested in picking up a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry as the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Could there be any doubt that we’d be in a completely different place—and arguably a much better place—right now as a nation? 

Unfortunately, there’s no going back to the kind of education that produced some of the greatest leaders of the 20^th century—Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill, among others.  The genie of hyper-specialization is already out of the bottle and majors in the humanities are already on their last legs. 

But perhaps a useful compromise could occur.  If we have to have people who specialize in business, law, medicine, or computer science, couldn’t we also work out a way to ensure that they also have a thorough grounding in those arts and sciences that can free their minds from the narrowness and shortsightedness of their specialized training?  I’m talking, of cause, about a training in the liberal arts and sciences—those disciplines that are said to make human beings truly free (liber).   Counterbalancing Accounting 1 with Shakespeare and Classical Political Theory, for example, might just provide future movers and shakers in the business world with a humanizing influence that may very well prevent them from the sort of fixation on the bottom line that has led American business leaders into so much trouble in recent years.

To accomplish this goal, it will either mean reducing the total number of credits that students take in their specialized majors in order to allow for either a much heftier dose of humanities classes and perhaps even a second major in a humanities discipline.   I have absolutely no doubts that if we did this we still could provide a very fine vocational training for all students, but we would also be ensuring that these students have the kind of expansive moral vision that is needed as we lurch forward into the 21^st century.

The Zombie Apocalypse Has Already Begun

A student of mine recently warned me to begin to prepare for the zombie apocalypse that he proclaimed would be happening very soon. He was joking of course, but I’m not so certain that his prediction isn’t accurate. In fact, one could argue that the zombie apocalypse has already begun and the zombies around us are now in the majority.

But first, we need to define what a zombie is.   

My favorite kind of zombie is that kind that you get in some tropical bar—a delightful concoction of rum, citrus juice, and apricot liqueur. Enough of those might certainly turn you into a zombie, but I think that this is a different sort of zombie than the one we are referring to when we talk about the “zombie apocalypse.”

We also use the term in reference to extremely dull, listless, affect-deprived individuals, as in “God, he’s such a zombie!” While those sort of zombies are all around us (they can easily be found occupying the administrative offices at most high schools and colleges) I don’t think that’s what we mean when we refer to the zombie apocalypse either. The extremely dull may eventually take over the earth, but I seriously doubt that we will have to worry about them chomping on our vital organs.

A zombie is usually defined as “the body of a dead person, given some form of life due to some external agency.” In the case of voodoo the zombie is brought to life by some supernatural force, typically for some evil purpose. Think of Bella Lugosi as the voodoo witch doctor in the cheesy 1932 horror film, White Zombie, summoning the forces of the dead to ensnare some virginal, extremely pale woman who had the misfortune of planning her summer vacation in Haiti during zombie season.

In the current manifestations of zombidom, dead persons are brought back to life due to some kind of global cataclysm. This sort of zombie is a fairly recent phenomenon, first unveiled, I believe, in George Romero’s 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead. In that film the dead became reanimated due to some kind of radioactive contamination from a space probe returning from Venus, and begin to chow down on those human beings who were too slow to run away from them. The only way to effectively stop a zombie, in this version and all subsequent ones, is to shoot it in the head or decapitate it. This essentially is the paradigm of the zombie that has been presented in films like Resident Evil, House of the Dead, zombie parodies like Sean of the Dead and Zombieland, and television shows like Walking Dead.

The key to understanding the nature of a zombie is to recognize that the zombie is always essentially will-less. It does what it does (at least in the post-Romero version) because it is driven by some dark, insatiable primordial need—i.e., the desire to engorge itself on the flesh of a living host (a symbol perhaps of the fear of being “consumed” during the act of coitus?). The zombie has no freedom to refrain from doing what its nature compels it to do and therefore its actions transcend categories of moral responsibility. You might have very good reasons for wanting to “kill” a zombie, but you would be completely out of line if you morally reproached one when it tried to eat you.

Now that we understand what a zombie is—a creature devoid of life and will, compelled to engage in some seriously antisocial behavior—why do I argue that a zombie apocalypse has already occurred?

I came to this conclusion only recently. If fact, the insight hit me while I was spending time with my family on Super Bowl Sunday. Despite what you might think, I’m not going to make the case that my family members have turned into zombies, because they felt compelled to watch one of the most witless, idiotic spectacles known to man. Who but a zombie, one might argue, would sit in front of a television set for hours watching over-weight jocks knock each other down or engage in idle banter about which Super Bowl commercial was the most “profound”?

No, had they been caught up in the spectacle of the Super Bowl, I probably wouldn’t have been quite so concerned. Instead, during the entire time the Super Bowl was on, almost every member of the family was totally engrossed by whatever form of personal technology they had at their disposal: Ipads, cellphones, Nooks, Kindles, laptops, etc. And those who didn’t have their own devices were looking on with those who did. Occasionally, someone would glance up at the TV and make a half-hearted comment about the current score or about how cool the commercials were, but then they immediately would go back to playing on their little devices.

It is the glut of technology so readily at our disposal that is precipitating the zombie apocalypse that my student warned me about. We have become a nation of zombies because we no longer have control over when or how we use our technology. Essentially, we use technology all the time, and we use it for just about everything. We use it to communicate with one another (email, text messaging), to express our deepest beliefs and feeling (blogs, Twitter) and to form virtual communities with like-minded others (Facebook). We no longer have the freedom and ability to meaningfully interact and interrelate with others in the real world, because the online world has seduced us with its sublime superficiality.

It’s certainly much easier being a techno-zombie than having to encounter the other in all of his or her messy, annoying, emotion-laden individuality. And it’s definitely much easier to communicate with others using a program like Facebook than to have to look them directly in the eyes and actually listen to what they have to say to us. The voodoo magic of modern technology has enabled all of us to enter into our own individual zombie havens, demanding that we return to the “real” world only when absolutely necessary—for food, sex, and to empty our bowels once or twice a day.

The zombie apocaplyse has most certainly already occurred and there are very few of us who have not been at least partially contaminated (After all, I’m writing this essay using the very technology that I am arguing has turned us into zombies in the first place!). And, unlike in the movies, the solution is not as simply as shooting the zombies among us in the head. The only way to “cure” a technozombie is to disconnect him from the technology that has caused his condition in the first place. In cases of extreme contamination the cure itself might lead to psychosis or death: who among us, after all, would care to a live in a world in which the ultimate sweetness of life—derived from our ability to surf, tweet, and post—has been so cruelly removed.

A less fatal cure is to force the technozombie to engage in deep, meaningful, face-to-face human interaction. My friend, Dr. Peter Fallon, of Roosevelt University, refers to this as “phatic communion” and thinks that it is the most essential form of communication between human beings. But achieving any level of phatic communion with a zombie is difficult at best and requires constant attentiveness. You’ve got to keep after those who are already infected, as well as those that have the potential to become infected, and continually force them to answer questions like: “How are things going?” “What are you up to?” “What are you reading these days?” and “Have you found a real girlfriend yet?” Once the infected party has begun to respond to these simple sorts of questions, you can move on to more significant ones like: “Whose works do you prefer, Elmore Leonard or Kurt Vonnegut?” “Which form of Buddhism is the optimal one for true enlightenment—Zen or Vipassana?” and “Why is there something at all rather than nothing?”

This line of questioning probably won’t work either, I’m afraid. Too many people under the age of 40 are already too far gone to be brought back from the technological infestation to which they have been exposed. The non-contaminated may just have to get used to living in a world filled with those who give the appearance of being alive, but who are actually more like the living dead than anything I have seen in even the most horrific zombie film.

As bad as this may seen, those who haven’t become zombies might learn to appreciate the benefits of living in the post apocalyptic world. After all, if you are capable of maintaining eye contact for more than 30 seconds, know how to engage in any kind of social pleasantries, and have even the most minimal sense of humor, you’ll probably wind up running the entire planet, since these qualities are virtually non-existent among zombies.

And since zombies are so slow, at least you’ll be the first on line to get dessert at every holiday. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?

The Cult of the Irrational

Hundred of years ago in Europe, during that period which we refer to as the Enlightenment, human beings began to replace many of their former superstitious beliefs with ideas that were the product of some of the most exquisite uses of human reason ever attempted by man. Our Founding Fathers were products of the Enlightenment and they clearly believed that the nation they were creating was grounded in the principles of natural reason (Jefferson’s self-evident truths).

The Founding Fathers would probably be dismayed to learn that, well over 200 years after this nation was established, so many of its citizens—and even a good number of its elected officials—would have mindsets that seemed much better suited for the Middle Ages than the 21st century.

For example, the clear scientific consensus on climate change—the view held by well over 99% of reputable climatologists—is that our planet is warming, that this warming trend is a consequence of the amount of carbon that human beings are spewing into the atmosphere, and that, unless we cap carbon emissions in some significant way (and how to do this is subject to legitimate dispute), the consequences for our future generations will be dire. Those are the scientific facts, plain and simple. And yet, despite all the hard evidence we have about climate change, a significant number of Americans either believe that the planet is not really warming at all, or, if it is, this has nothing to do with human behavior. One Republican senator, James Inhofe, went so far as to call climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.” And he’s the former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment, no less!

We’ve also know for quite a long time that our planet is billions of years old, that human beings as a species only evolved from lower forms of primates about 200,000 years ago, and that the dinosaurs were long gone before we came into the picture. However, a significant number of Americans—almost all evangelical Christians and the majority of Republicans—believe that the world was created literally in seven days and that human beings were placed on this planet by God on the seventh day. In order to explain the messy problem of dinosaur fossils that seem to predate human existence by millions of years, creationists have argued that humans and dinosaurs actually co-existed on the planet. There’s even a creationist theme park in Kentucky that shows children in primitive garb happily riding on the backs of friendly dinosaurs. If you think that these views are held only by the most ignorant Americans, guess again. Marco Rubio, who is very likely to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, recently responded when asked how old he thought the earth was, “Whether the earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to actually answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.” Keep in mind that there is a very good chance that this individual could be the next President of the United States of America!

There have always been irrational people in American society, but in the Age of Obama, they seem to be climbing out of the woodwork. From the very beginning of Obama’s presidency, there were people (again a majority of Republicans and evangelical Christians) who passionately believed he was a Muslim (he never was), a socialist (not even close) and that he was not really a U.S. citizen (even after the State of Hawaii produced his U.S. birth certificate).  

For Americans like these, reason, logic, and evidence don’t matter at all in terms of their beliefs. They are convinced instead by the proclamations of authority figures (religious leaders or political pundits like Rush Limbaugh), by the literal teachings of their sacred texts (the Bible, of course), and by their own dread of living in a world inhabited by people whose skin is a darker shade than their own or whose worldviews aren’t shaped by traditional Christian faith. It’s that basic underlying fear of a world in change that has these Americans clinging for dear life to their antiquated religious beliefs and to the Republican Party, which has for all practical purposes become the home for those who belong to the cult of extreme irrationality.

We can, of course, laugh at the silly, superstitious beliefs of know-nothing Americans, and dismiss these views as being the products of defective minds. But the men and women who hold such views now effectively control one of the two major political parties in the United States—a party, which very soon could once again be in charge of the U.S. government—and have a strange-hold over the education of children and the teaching of “science” in many parts of the country. What is needed, then, is the same kind of intensive campaign on the part of those of us who embrace the wisdom of the Enlightenment as has been waged for years now by the forces of irrationality.  

Fortunately, those who are part of the cult of irrationality are a dying breed. They tend to be old, white, less educated than the mainstream population, and confined to those parts of the country like the Bible Belt, where ignorance and superstition are positively embraced (or at least tolerated). The very know-nothing attitudes that are indicative of membership in the cult of irrationality also means that these individuals will be less likely to compete in an economy in which the possession of openness to new ideas, tolerance of differing viewpoints, and effective critical thinking ability will determine economic success in the information age.

But this doesn’t mean that we can’t weep for the children who, through no fault of their own, are being raised in families and communities in which the cult of irrationality dominates. It is precisely for these innocent children—many of whom will grow up wishing that they could ride on the backs of dinosaurs just like their ancestors did—that we need a concerted campaign to reclaim a primary role for reason in American society. The consequences, if we fail to do this, will be the existence of a permanent underclass of backwards Americans who cling to old-time religion and fixate on the joys of the next life, because the world and the pleasures it has to offer has ultimately passed them by.

On Tragedy and Moral Responsibility

2012 is now officially over. Although the year saw some glimmers of economic recovery on the horizon and an Obama victory over the forces of rabid conservativism, it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good year for our country or for the planet. On the East Coast two events in particular caused the year to end on such a disturbing note, that you almost can’t blame people for wanting to move on as quickly as possible to 2013. These events, of course, were the destruction caused in the mid-Atlantic region by Hurricane Sandy in October and the shooting of 20 school children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut just a few weeks ago.

 Both these events can legitimately be described as tragedies. In the storm lives were lost, thousands were left homeless, and there was billions of dollars in property damages. At Sandy Hook innocent children and teachers were murdered by a deranged young gunman, Adam Lanza, who also took his own life and that of his mother. The only appropriate response to either of these tragic events is to feel immense sympathy for the victims and offer them as much emotional and financial support as we can to help them deal with their losses.

But there are two important lessons that we should take away from events like these.

The first is existential—the real recognition that human life is inherently tragic, that horrific things happen all the time to very good people, and that the attempt to insulate ourselves from the tragic nature of life is a fool’s quest. Indeed, one could argue that the entire life project of many Americans is precisely to try to forget as much as is humanly possible just how tragic life can be. We spend much of our time engaged in the most frivolous sorts of activities—shopping for unnecessary creature comforts, gorging ourselves on unhealthy food, traveling all over the world, building huge homes for ourselves and our bloated families—all in an attempt to forget that human life is inherently vulnerable and transient. 

The simple truth is that, as human beings, each of us will experience the death of loved ones as a regular occurrence, we will suffer physical and emotional pain as a normal part of living our lives, we will know failure, loss, and rejection, and we will eventually get sick and inevitably die. And all this must be done alone, because no one else can live our lives for us and no one else can suffer and die for us. It shouldn’t take a wall of water from the Atlantic Ocean sweeping our homes away or the murder of innocent school children to make us understand the tragic nature of the human condition; daily existence itself should teach us that—if we didn’t incessantly try to cover over this fact. 

In the end, however, try as we might to ignore the tragic nature of the human condition, ultimately we can’t really escape from it. Even the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” will get fat, will get old, and will die. And their children will die. And their children’s children will die. All of the riches and pleasures of the American consumeristic lifestyle can’t disguise the fact that all we really amount to at the end of our lives is a hunk of rancid flesh fit only for the consumption of the meanest parasites. That is the inevitable conclusion of our all too brief time on this little planet of ours and there is not much we can really do about it. 

Were we to embrace the inherent tragic nature of our human condition, instead of constantly trying to run away from it, I’m convinced that we would all be much happier for it in the end. And the happiness I’m talking about is not the shallow sort that comes from buying a new Ipad or designer outfit. It’s the happiness that comes from understanding that life is precious, that our time on the planet is fleeting, and that we should try to live the most meaningful existence we can, “for we shall not pass this way again.”

The second lesson, I believe, that we should take away from these two events is that, despite the inevitably of tragedy in our lives—or perhaps precisely because of it—we have a moral duty to do what we can to minimize the amount of unnecessary tragedy that innocent human beings are forced to experience. We also need to seriously consider how our own selfish, materialistic, consumeristic—i.e., American—lifestyles may contribute to making the tragedies that are the price we pay for corporeal existence more severe or more common than they might otherwise be.

Hurricanes, for example, are inevitable. And, as long as there are severe hurricanes, people will die as a result of them, and property will be destroyed. But just because hurricanes are part of nature, that doesn’t mean that we Americans are totally blameless for the swath of devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. Many climatologists, for example, believe that Sandy would not have been quite so destructive if water temperatures had not been artificially raised because of the climate change that we are responsible for. We should also reflect on the fact that American taxpayers essentially subsidize those who live in hurricane prone areas by providing them with government insurance that allows them to live on barrier islands, where no one probably should be permitted to live. The question that we need to begin to ask ourselves is what we collectively are going to do about facts like these to ensure that fewer Americans die as a result of disasters like hurricanes.

Similarly, there will always be insane people among us who are prone to violence. Arming every citizen in the county won’t prevent mass shooting, nor will putting a police officer in every school in the country. But we might begin to question our obsessive need to cut taxes at all costs, even if this cost is the kind of community mental health counseling that might have identified Adam Lanza as a troubled individual and provided him with the kind of help he desperately needed. Similarly, we might begin to reflect upon a gun culture in the United States that allows mentally ill individuals in many parts of the country to buy assault weapons with no background check. Perhaps it’s time to start questioning whether our first amendment rights are—or need to be—as absolute as the NRA would like them to be. If assault weapons and their ammunition were impossible to come by, Adam Lanza might still have been responsible for the death of innocent lives, but 20 children and 6 teachers probably wouldn’t be dead right now.

Ultimately, you and I are responsible for the misery, suffering, and death caused by both hurricane Sandy and the shooting at Sandy Hook. We are responsible not because we could have prevented events like this from happening, but because our mindless commitment to a selfish materialistic American lifestyle has made these events far more catastrophic than they needed to be.

The question is what, if anything, are we going to do about it?