Random Intuitions: November 2012

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Civility Rules

Image from care123.com

Enjoying Holiday Dinners without Friction

A humanist and a priest sit down for a holiday meal. No, this is not the setup for a joke, as much as it may sound like one! It actually describes what happened at our recent Thanksgiving celebration. These ceremonial feasts can be tricky; sometimes they’re the only time certain family members and friends of widely differing stripes sit down to share a meal together. There are bound to be a variety of political, religious, and ideological views represented.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I saw an amusing Facebook post that read, “’Tis the season to have your life choices questioned at the dinner table.” I hope it’s not as bad as that for you! (it sure isn’t for me). In fact I consider myself incredibly fortunate in this regard. My mother and sister are still at least nominally Catholic; I’m the only member of the family who officially left the church. At the Thanksgiving family meal that just past, my wife and I had the wonderful opportunity to drive the priest who married us to my sister’s house to celebrate. Even at the time of our engagement, I had ceased being a practicing Catholic, and this wonderfully witty and friendly man had no problem with that. He was our family priest when my sister and I were growing up, and he’s the real deal. (I think it says a lot about the tolerance of this time in our culture that a priest can remain a lifelong friend of someone who in times past might have been shunned as an “apostate.”)

When we get together, we don’t discuss theology or the Vatican (the latter in particular would be a non-starter); we talk about life. My critiques of the Catholic Church are voluble and deeply felt, but I don’t get into these with him. He’s such a thoroughly decent person that I can’t help believing he would agree with my judgments of the moral failings of the institution to which he is tethered by a lifetime commitment. He’s a deeply humane individual who has never uttered a misogynist word in his life and who would no sooner molest a child than I would fly an aircraft into a building.

Is my family priest, thoroughly decent individual that he is, responsible to answer for the Vatican’s culpability in things like the subjugation of women, child abuse, and denial of birth control to the developing world? Of course not! No more than I, as an American citizen, can be held personally responsible for wars of opportunity my country prosecutes in defiance of international law. I would be quite surprised if I were to learn if this gentleman hasn’t registered his personal protest of the way the Vatican covered up its rampant child abuse scandal, for instance, just as I resisted (as best I could) my country’s devastation of Iraq. We’re all limited in our influence over world events.

Anyway, he said the grace at the meal, and it was as genial and inclusive a prayer as one is likely to hear. There is great wisdom in the age-old prescription for avoiding politics and religion at mixed-company gatherings. These topics cause people to ‘think with the blood” as no others do; avoiding them and simply enjoying each others’ company is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I would be ashamed of myself if I were to start a war by lobbing a politics-or-religion grenade into a family gathering. If someone asks my philosophical position, I put it in thoroughly positive terms: “I’m a humanist; I believe in the Enlightenment values of democracy, personal autonomy, human rights and the separation of church and state.” It would be puerile and downright rude to wade in with something like “I believe organized religion is largely responsible for the subjugation of women, the abuse of children, and panoramic needless human suffering.” These are sentiments suited to a rigorous one-on-one debate, not a holiday gathering. Civility rules!

Friday, November 16, 2012

Prizing the Life of the Mind

Image from artofliving.org

Any time a civic, religious, or spiritual leader asks you to surrender your intellect or check your mind at the door, it is wise to question his motives. Giving up one’s critical faculties is a kind of suicide; the self-abnegation it represents is not virtuous, but inexcusably lazy.

Extinction, apocalypse, the end of days. There’s something both seductive and sinister about these concepts. From the suicide bomber to the messianic crusader to the apocalyptic evangelical, there seems to be a nearly-universal desire to bring the whole human project to a close. If only the end of the world could somehow be brought about, we could be done with the whole difficult, thorny problem of being human. In my view, even the “nirvana” concept—the extinction of self—is (or can be) a strain of this kind of thinking. Life for us humans--as far as we know, the only animals aware of our own imminent demise and forced to consider ethical and philosophical problems--is indeed difficult. There seems to be an innate part of us that longs for it all to be brought to an end. I think this is among the more contemptible parts of our makeup, one that demands continual resistance.

What is evolution’s unique gift to us if not our highly-developed cerebral cortex? The ability to think, to weigh and consider arguments, to retain the good and discard the rest? Any religion, philosophy, or party line that demands that you surrender your critical thinking capacity is more than suspect; those who make such requirements are usually up to something. They may have a genuinely sinister agenda, such as those who propagandize young people into throwing away their lives as suicide murderers. Or their motives may be plainly larcenous, like the televangelist who uses a false prospectus to separate credulous retirees from their meager savings. In any case, these and others like them are to be resisted by all those who prize the life of the mind.

An appreciation of art, literature, music, and irony is a superior means of developing an ethical and moral compass; it brings one face-to-face with moral and ethical dilemmas and offers no easy out. Fiction and mythology tells us truths that are otherwise inaccessible, and music expresses human feelings for which no words exist. Philosophy invites us to think deeply about the beautiful, the true, and the transcendent. Humanists are no strangers to the numinous; in fact, we relish it. The stunning beauty of a painting, the transcendent voice of a symphony, and the treasures of literature and poetry-- these are all of inexpressible value to us. It is precisely because we do not entertain fantasies of living forever that we find the consolations of philosophy (and the other humanities) so precious.

Goya famously declared that “the sleep of reason breeds monsters.” We have certainly seen that maxim borne out throughout human history. It is our reason, our capacity for free inquiry and thought, that makes us distinctly human. It is too precious a commodity to be surrendered, no matter how seductively the offer is made.