Other nations

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.

– Writer and naturalist Henry Beston, 1926, quoted in Philip Hoare’s The Whale

Sen. Robert Byrd, animal advocate

Obviously Robert Byrd was a complicated man. He went from being a segregationist (and Klan member!) to an ardent champion of civil rights and supporter of Barack Obama’s election. He also went from being a supporter of the Vietnam war to a fierce critic of of presidential warmaking and executive power, giving eloquent and impassioned speeches against the Iraq war when most of his colleagues were signing on to the invasion.

Byrd is perhaps best known for his love of the Senate’s traditions and byzantine rules and his unbridled love of pork, which he procured for his home state of West Virginia hand over fist (of course, one man’s pork…). Less well known is the fact that Senator Byrd was one of the Senate’s biggest supporters of the humane treatment of animals. In 2008, the Humane Society presented Byrd with its highest honor, The Joseph Wood Krutch Medal, for his work to improve animal welfare. R.I.P.

Friday Metal: Highlights of 2010 (so far)

Hard to believe the year’s half over! There’s been a lot of great metal released so far. Here are a few personal faves:

Ludicra, “A Larger Silence” (from the album The Tenant)

High on Fire, “Snakes for the Divine” (from the album of the same name)

Alcest, “Écailles de Lune (part II)” (from the album Écailles de Lune)

As I Lay Dying, “Beyond Our Suffering” (from The Powerless Rise)

Bison B.C., “Two-Day Booze” (from Dark Ages)

Dillinger Escape Plan, “Farewell, Mona Lisa” (from Option Paralysis)

Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract from the phenomena of experience in order to provide a more precise mapping or modeling of certain aspects of reality for various purposes; the error of reductionism is to mistake those abstract models for the whole of reality itself. (Huston Smith once compared it to thinking that an increasingly detailed map of Illinois will–eventually–result in a map of the entire United States.)

Physicalism and reductionism are frequently seen as threats to religious belief. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as that they seem to undermine belief in an immaterial (and possibly immortal) soul, or that they deny the “specialness” of human beings. However, I do think it’s possible for a Christian to affirm a non-reductive version of physicalism. This would mean that human beings are physical beings with consciousness, feeling, and rationality. These are genuinely “emergent” features of the world–features that appeared over the course of evolutionary history and which we share with other animals, but they are not reducible to the physico-chemical aspect of reality. They are not simply the outworking of their underlying material substrate but exert a genuine causal influence on the world. Philosophers and theologians have characterized how this might work in a variety of ways, such as “whole-part” or “top-down” causation. But the point is that the mental introduces genuine novelty into the world and is capable of affecting the course of events. Moreover, if something like this is right, it seems possible that God could, at death, preserve whatever it is that constitutes each person’s unique selfhood (e.g., memories, character traits) and “translate” them into some other medium, whether embodied or not.

Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and the perennial philosophy

In the previous post I mentioned Aldous Huxley’s embrace of the “perennial philosophy” and his influence on the scholar of religion Huston Smith. Smith’s work had a big influence on me during my undergraduate years. When I was a callow 20-year-old atheist, Smith’s writings, as well as a series of interviews he did with Bill Moyers for PBS, helped show me that my understanding of religion–including the Christianity that I had so confidently rejected–was extremely shallow.

Moreover, Smith’s argument that the religions of the world were culturally mediated expressions of a “primordial tradition” (what Huxley referred to as the “perennial philosophy”) was very appealing to me. He combined a robust ontology with an ecumenical spirit that seemed superior–intellectually, morally, and spiritually–to both conservative “orthodoxy” and watered-down liberalism or materialistic atheism.

Huxley defined the philosophia perennis like this:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being (Huxley, “The Philosophy of the Saints,” Huxley and God, p. 61)

Huxley characterizes the perennial philosophy as a “working hypothesis” about the nature of reality that goes beyond “humanism and nature-worship” but is wary of the over-developed dogmas of organized religion. This working hypothesis can provide the basis, Huxley thinks, for experiential “research” into spiritual Reality.

Smith, being a scholar of religion, takes a more positive view of the developed traditions of the world’s religions. Like the Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon, who Smith has also been influenced by, he sees each tradition as an expression or revelation of the divine Mind that is complete in itself as a vehicle for salvation. Unlike some forms of pluralism, which see the various religions as gropings toward an ultimately unknowable Reality (e.g., John Hick’s), Smith’s view is that the divine Reality makes him/her/itself known by means of the various religions.

Embracing a perennial-philosophy perspective is pretty unfashionable these days. Both the scholarly study of religion and Christian theology tend now to emphasize the differences among traditions. Some Christians attack perennialism as an import of pagan metaphysics into the biblical tradition. However, others–like the Anglican theologian Owen Thomas–argue that Christianity is a synthesis of “biblical religion” and a Neoplatonist-influenced version of the perennial philosophy.

Despite its problems, I think the perennial philosophy continues to have appeal because it seems to address the problem of religious pluralism without falling into either exclusivism or relativism.

You can see at least some of the Moyers interviews with Smith on YouTube here.

The works of Huston Smith that had the biggest impact on me:

The World’s Religions

Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions

Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

See also his Soul of Christianity for an interpretation of the Christian tradition that is heavily influenced by his perennialist outlook.

Huxley edited an anthology of mystical writings, interspersed with his own commentary, called–appropriately–The Perennial Philosophy.

Frithjof Schuon makes the case for perennialism in religion in his book The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

Huxley on distractions

I’ve been spending what free time I have this summer dipping into the works of Aldous Huxley, both his fiction (Island, Eyeless In Gaza) and non-fiction (Brave New World Revisited). I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays called Huxley and God, which, as the title suggests, deals broadly with religion.

Huxley is best known of course for his dystopian novel Brave New World, but he also had a lifelong interest in religion and mysticism. He popularized the idea of a “perennial philosophy”–a basic metaphysical, psychological, and ethical structure common to the great religions of the world. Huxley was a friend and mentor to Huston Smith, who further explored the perennial philosophy (or “primordial tradition” as Smith prefers to call it) in his study of the world’s religions.

One of the points Huxley returns to in several of these essays is the danger distractions pose to the spiritual life. We’re more commonly aware of the dangers of our passions–our deep-seated desires, our self-will. But, Huxley says, the “imbecile mind”–with its constant, meaningless chatter–can be even more insidious:

It is of [distactions'] essence to be irrelevant and pointless. To find out just how pointless and irrelevant they can be, one has only to sit down and try to recollect oneself. Preoccupations connected with the passions will most probably come to the surface of consciousness; but along with them will rise a bobbling scum of miscellaneous memories, notions, and imaginings–childhood recollections of one’s grandmother’s Yorkshire terrier, the French name for henbane, a White-Knightish scheme for catching incendiary bombs in midair–in a word, every kind of nonsense and silliness. … [W]e are … creatures possessed of a complicated psychophysiological machine that is incessantly grinding away and that, in the course of its grinding, throws up into consciousness selections from that indefinite number of mental permutations and combinations which its random functioning makes possible. Most of these permutations and combinations have nothing to do with our passions or our rational occupations; they are just imbecilities–mere casual waste products of psychophysiological activity. (Huxley and God, pp. 153-4)

In Huxley’s view, the modern world has made it particularly difficult to free oneself from distractions because it has elevated the pursuit of constant distraction to a positive good (one is reminded of Pascal’s line about men’s miseries deriving from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone):

The Old Adam’s restless curiosity must be checked and his foolishness, his dissipation of sprit turned to wisdom and one-pointedness. That is why the would-be mystic is always told to refrain from busying himself with matters which do not refer to his ultimate goal, or in relation to which he cannot effectively do immediate and concrete good. This self-denying ordinance covers most of the things with which, outside business hours, the ordinary person is mainly concerned–news, the day’s installment of the various radio epics, this year’s car models and gadgets, the latest fashions. But it is upon fashion, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising for which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system depends for its proper functioning. For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevancies, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been more difficult. (pp. 156-7)

One can well imagine what Huxley would’ve had to say about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, um, blogs, and the various gadgets that keep us constantly in touch with these sources of distraction. O brave new world, indeed.

“Graceful simplicity” in worship

Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d be interested to know what Derek or Christopher thinks of this.

Varieties of atheism

Brandon points out the problem with lumping all contemporary atheist thinkers together as “new atheists.” He highlights the work of philosopher Owen Flanagan, whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, as an atheist who doesn’t necessarily fit the new atheist paradigm.

It sounds to me–at least from Brandon’s description–that Flanagan is what I would call a non-reductive atheist. That is, anyone who’s willing to countenance a “naturalized spirituality” isn’t likely to have much sympathy with the view that all things that exist can be explained by reducing them to their most basic elements (genes or fundamental physical particles, depending on what science you want to use as your master-discourse). I’ve often thought it strange that people who consider themselves “humanists” could be comfortable with the reductionist perspective characteristic of some of the “new” atheists.

Balance!

Today’s WaPo offers a review of a spate of new political books under the headline “Flame-throwing political books from the Right and the Left.” In judicious Post fashion, it finds the Left and the Right about equally guilty of partisan extremism. “If you believe the liberals,” we’re told “we have Republicans going insane after their White House defeat.” Shrill!

Of course, the conservative books under review pretty much to a one are about how Barack Obama hates America and wants to destroy our constitutional system of government. And they didn’t even mention Andy McCarthy’s new book.

Friday Metal: Revocation, “Dismantle the Dictator”