Epiphenomina or in the Image of God

Dr. Warren Brown speaks to dynamical systems and the physical underpinnings of immortality.

Watch this space for more...

In the meantime listen to the podcast.

Happy New Year!

The doctor tells Homer Simpson he has a rare disease and is going to die -- in a week! Homer resolves to live every moment he has left with gusto. On his last night he stays up to see the dawn while listening to Larry King read the Bible on tape. But he doesn't die and the doctor says it was all a big mistake!

As the credits rolls we see Homer on the couch eating pork rinds and drinking Duff while staring blankly at Celebrity Wive's Makeover Smack Down. Homer is a hot mess and can't seem to change.

Just before the holidays someone posted a classic question on a training and development group discussion page on LinkedIn -- 'What book has changed YOUR life?' Generally, I've been amazed at how worthless these discussion pages are. They almost always attract vapid comments about how smart the author is and why you should hire them.

But this one was different.

First of all, there were more than a hundred posts -- more than I've ever seen. Second, they were quite thoughtful and unselfconscious. The posts listed the Bible and The Power of Positive Thinking; Dale Carnegie and Anthony Robbins; Seven Habits... and 'The Fifth Discipline...'. I particularly loved an impassioned post that praised the transformative power of the Qur'an at great length and eloquence; and then, said, 'And I also liked the One Minute Manager.

Amid all the 'Best of' lists and reflections on the year as it flickers out, the 'Book' question is a pretty standard one. But it highlights a question that has burned in me for years and I hope will yield meaningful action in the new year -- How do we remake ourselves to do what needs to be done in a changing world?

I'm excited to find out!  But for now, back to the couch.

Beauty, Desire and Sales

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Laughter -- Universal Prosody and the Protoconversation

There was a massive wave of laughter as I walked back to my seat. The play was Sheer Madness at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and they were laughing at a particularly broad joke at the top of the second act.

'On man that's cheap,' I thought as I continued to the back of the house. The show was already one of the longest running shows in the United States and that was 15 years ago -- and it's still running! I had seen it maybe six times because my then girlfriend (now wife) was playing the ditzy hairdresser role for the last year.

I was not in the mood to see it again. But as I trudged up the bleachers I stopped listening to the play and focused on the laughter. The audience had completely lost it and by the time I got back to my seat I had too.

In his outrageously insightful book on Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman says, 'Nature loves good timing. The sciences find synchronies throughout the natural world, whenever one natural process entrains or oscillates in rhythm with another. When waves are out of synch, they cancel each other; when they synchronize, they amplify. In the natural world, pacing occurs with everything from ocean waves to heartbeats; in the interpersonal realm, our emotional rhythms entrain.'

He notes that our bodies are way ahead of our minds when it comes to this kind of thing and that the rhythm or prosody of speech can align us with another before the meaning of the words sinks in. This protoconversation, as he calls it, has the power to either connect or disconnect us depending on if we're in the groove or not.

That's all nice to know but the laugh's the thing!

Never Tell Me the Odds

I totally shanked statistics class in business school. I didn't get it. (Naturally my first job was developing financial simulations for Fannie Mae, which oozed statistics.) But over the years I've become fascinated with figuring the odds and the last few weeks have set that part of my brain on fire!

I spent the last week working with ideas entrepreneurial thanks to the Kauffman Foundation's FastTrac program. This particular incarnation takes place at the Levin Institute -- love them! It was a blast to meet so many wonderful, optimistic people!

In November I attended Entrepreneurs' Week at Colombia University. Just about every session started with someone or other describing how tough the odds are for achieving success. And yet the place was bustling.

It seems Americans in particular keep venturing despite the odds. Someone told me this week that the United States is like Mecca for entrepreneurs. I hope that's true; it made me proud.

Time to Grow Up!

For the last few months I’ve seen a lot of people yelling and screaming that Obama – and all liberals – are Socialists or Fascists or whatever, and that they are out to destroy the country. In the midst of all this it suddenly struck me that I’ve heard this sort of thing before. Sure, the particulars are different, but the voices are frighteningly familiar – I’ve heard them my whole life. These people are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore. You know what -- so am I!

So what’s their complaint? Well, they’re afraid that the government is going to take over healthcare and – given that old Uncle Sam has already snatched the banks and the car companies – that seems like part of a larger plan to stamp out freedom, liberty and justice. The fact that that’s objectively not true doesn’t make a dent. The fact that America has a third-rate healthcare system that costs a third more per head than just about any other developed nations doesn’t seem to matter at all. ‘Everything’s fine just the way it is,’ they seem to say.

So why am I mad as hell? Because we got big problems and the only way to solve them is together. The anger from my friends on the right is making them blind and making it impossible to get things done. That's what anger does. Our minds were ‘designed’ a long time ago to help us jump out of the way when something mean leaps out of the tree. In the meantime we’ve learned to think rationally but don’t kid your self, when we get freaked that old lizard brain stills runs the show. We might have a nice cover story about how we’re a nation of self-sufficient cowboys fighting the revenuers but, in truth, we’re just trying to stay ahead of whatever-the-hell-that-thing-is-with-the-big-teeth.

So grow up people. Let’s work together and figure this thing out – together.

Man vs. God

Two different ways of considering god -- See if you agree that Karen Armstrong is right.

Essays – WSJ: Man vs. God
SEPTEMBER 12, 2009, 2:08 P.M. ET

We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question "Where does evolution leave God?" Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.

—Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious affairs. The latest, "The Case for God," will be published by Knopf later this month.

Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do

















Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.

Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.

Charles Darwin

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!

The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.

What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

—Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale," "The God Delusion." His latest book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will be published by Free Press on Sept. 22.

Merwyn on Moyers

I teach Sunday school. One of my students plays football, acts, sings AND tries to make sense of the world. What a kid!

Then he told me how much he loved poetry.

Jeezus! The kid is living up to standards I couldn't even remember.

Happily Bill Moyers had the great poet W. S. Merwyn on his Journal so that I could partake without any effort.

Having lost my father last November after a year and a half of failing health the episode was really hard. Here's one poem that illustrates why.

W. S. Merwyn

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

An Heroic Story Obscuring a Deeper Truth

In her op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan laments the disreputable state in which Wall Street finds itself. She recounts 9-11 and the heroic effort that followed to get the market back on its feet. And it was an heroic story.

I admire of Peggy Noonan's talent. She's a really good writer and an excellent storyteller. Remember 'Morning in America?' That's the kind of stuff she used to write for her old boss Ronald Reagan. But while we were admiring that beautiful idea Reagan and his minions stripped away the regulations and the regulatory structure that allowed us to get where we are today.

So why draw on the heroic tale of eight years ago?

I loved the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges and its lessons are relevant here. To wit: it is ennobling when our desire for meaning, our desire for being part of something larger than just ourselves is invoked by an attack such as occurred on 9-11. But who we are at core does not necessarily change for the better after such an attack. Violence doesn’t just invoke the better angels of our nature. Violence begets violence, a desire for revenge, a fearfulness and paranoia that can infect what we do in subtle ways.

She seems to say that these guys are heroes so that which opposes them -- like those sissified regulators -- must be evil. (That's the Manchean world view that found full paranoid manifestation in President Bush's thinking.) I'm sorry, life isn't that simple.

In truth, I think Peggy is blind to her own illusion. Indeed, all of us can be blinded by the power of a beautiful idea, a powerful story. But what if that story, which contains some truth, serves to divert our attention from another more pervasive – and much less pleasant – story?

Self interest drives a market in predictable ways. The problem is that human nature is much more complex than that. We can be driven by higher things beyond self interest, among them a shared search for meaning, belonging and the selfless regard for others. But there are darker, more irrational impulses by which all humans can be driven and that's the reason we are where we are now. After all, the market is just a bunch of humans connected on a trading floor and by phones and computers and so on. Those humans all have greater and lesser angels of their natures that compel them to do what they do. No matter how well it's told, a story about a week’s heroism does not change that fact.

The Most Perfect Music Ever Written

My counterpoint teacher was a small, frail man who doted on his elderly mother and lived in the suburbs with a half dozen cats. He taught composition at Temple University in northern Philly. By the time I studied with him in the mid-‘70s he looked almost too much like what you would expect from a teacher of 17th century composition: a very gentle man, mostly bald and sporting overlarge glasses. But you could also see how much he loved the music he taught.

As a young man he had served in the Army during WWII. By the end of the war he was stationed in Berlin and on the day that fighting ended in Europe, he suddenly disappeared. He was AWOL for several days. After he re-emerged he explained that he had traveled behind what would be called the iron curtain to visit the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig. My professor had said that the choral refrain from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ‘Wahrlich, dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen.’ or ‘Truly this was the son of God.’ was the most perfect music ever written.

And I think he was right.

That's Marketing!

My Window

It had started to snow in clumps like dandelion seeds, half falling and half rising, caught between the buildings. Above the tarred skylight the sky was pale blue with opal clouds. But higher, it was grey and brown like slush.

A little while later I looked again and the sky was a bright blue with great cloud mountains passing improbably above. In the distance other clouds stood still like white walls of a colossal room.

If the Medium is the Message...

This is Alexis Gorman, 26, who 'works in marketing' in my hometown of Manhattan. Here she is on the front page of today's New York Times (August 2, 2008). The picture is sort of a re-creation, I suppose, of Ms. Gorman calling her boyfriend and telling him that they were through ... on his voice mail! On purpose!

“Text messaging someone ‘I would prefer not to see you again’ is really not my style,” she added. [Noble! And thanks for not saying 'That's just not the way I roll.'] “But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.” [Not so much.]

The article tells of 'Slydial' a service that allows you to avoid having a direct conversation with the person you call, ensuring that you go right to voice mail. As such, the service allows us to communicate without communing. Like email, like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and blogs, we can post information and read what others have posted--all without actually connecting.

So are these forms of communication artifacts of an increasingly alienated age? Or is this just technology saving us the cost of a stamp for the letters we no longer have to write?

2007

First, you must know what you are dealing with...

When I got out of music school, I was afraid I was going to starve to death so I got a bill collector job--of all things! Most of the time I'd sit at my desk with a stack of account cards calling one client after another, asking them to pay. But if I couldn't reach them I had to drive to their houses and try to collect mano a mano.

One fine fall day I drove to this nice little house in Charlottesville Virginia and found my client--a skinny, white man of some 60 years or so--planted on his sofa while his wife--not a signatory--puttered around him. Although it was only just mid-afternoon he had already had a couple of cocktails and was feeling no pain. It was obvious pretty quickly that the guy had no means or intent of paying his bill.

'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed,' he said as he explained that he hadn't worked in six months. He repeated it probably a half dozen times during our 15 minute conversation - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.' Damn It! I thought, We'll never get paid.

Twenty five years later I can still see him sinking into his Early American Herculon sofa with his pants at mid-thorax. Given his age and the likelihood of alcohol toxemia, he must be on a stain-resistant sofa in the sky by now.

But, to me, he resides in a little Cape Cod in my head forever reminding me - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.'

And, of course, we never did get paid.

Shoulders of Giants

We understand the world through our direct experience, the shared experience of our communities, and the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before us. But what a jumble this last one is! Let's work on that a little bit. I suppose that should be 'knowledge and wisdom' that have survived the test of time. That's still not enough. It's really what's survived by chance, isn't it? (If you think the phrase 'god's will' might fit in there, what, prey tell, serves god to burn down the library in Alexandria? And what wisdom might have been lost to that inferno?)

Consider the view from here, this generation. We are awash with stuff--cars and planes and cell phones and laser pointers and computers, plastic and magnetic resonance scanners and medicine made by cracking the genetic code, the Internet, and on and on and on. It's everywhere and we use it everyday. So much so it's practically invisible. Two hundred years ago none of it existed. Moreover the science that makes these inventions possible didn't exist. That science, and the engineering and invention, that gave rise to all that stuff, must have a profound impact on how we understand the world. So imagine understanding the world WITHOUT ALL OF THAT!

So, science has changed how we understand the world. Participating in a religion without acknowledging scientific understanding does not return the participant to a purer day, a time closer to eternal truths. It is self delusion and magical thinking. Moreover those that endeavor to do so cannot hope to know how those who lived in pre-scientific times really saw things. Those ancients didn't ignore what their everyday lives told them about how the world works and neither should we.

As Newton said we stand on the shoulders of giants and owe it to those who came before us--in science, in the arts and in religion--to move forward with all the tools at our command.

Addicted to War

Chris Hedges has written a hell of a book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He describes with significant nuance his experience of war (as a journalist) including his 'addiction' to being in a war zone. For him, with great peril came his most robust life experiences. Recovering from his addiction he writes with passion against wars of choice.

I was raised in a family of Quakers--the Society of Friends, the proper name. While the religion teaches absolute pacifism my father fought in World War II and Korea. I came of age just as the USA withdrew from Vietnam. I do not believe in absolute pacifism but would never have fought in Vietnam or Iraq, wars we undertook inappropriately.

That said even as a 50-year old man I can still hear the call of battle, and almost regret being untested, unproven and unformed by its horrible rigors.

That odd sense of loss has always been stirred by the wonderful movie Patton.

...type, type, type...

In our gut we feel that life cannot have arisen randomly. But consider other hard-to-believe things proven to be true. For example, we know from a wide range of instruments that the universe is nearly incomprehensively vast. If we could truly understand the scope of the universe, hold its disorienting vastness in our mind, then it would be a simple thing to understand how conscious life arose from a serious of improbable events.

Why?

Imagine that the universe was a practically endless field on which you could lay out every possible combination of events necessary to generate life--presence of raw materials, appropriate proximity to a star, animating events, etc. Given the nearly infinite scope of that imaginary field--the universe--the emergence of life is, in fact, practically unavoidable.

Consider the issue from another angle: it has been said that if you have enough monkeys typing for long enough one of them will replicate the works of Shakespeare. This sounds absurd until you imagine that you have a near infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. Given that, success becomes inevitable. So it is with life.

Is God missing from this picture? No. God's being is the fabric of the universe animated by his grace and emerging from his creative pulse, some 15 billion years ago.

What Are The Chances?

I do this gratuitously philosophical training module, which I might call 'What are the chances?' In it, I step the students through their lives in reverse, noting moments that would have led them somewhere other than NYC in this particular moment ... class, career path, etc. I then extend the exercise to their families, home towns, respective nations, the earth, solar system, etc., back to the Big Bang. (A bit like the scene from Our Town.) From all this we are able to do a rough calculation of how infinitely improbable it is that we find ourselves here and now. I show them a picture of a person standing on the tippy top of a pyramid to illustrate the point. But then I ask them again what the chances are that they are here. It's a trick question in that the answer given that they are here is 100%.

The sense from the ensuing conversation is that miraculously--god or no god--we are here against incredible odds and that means, in a sense we arise inevitably from an environment well suited to bear us up--a beautiful idea. And even if this weren't true, it can be significant if one student hears it and believes it. Because, then, they might take the chance in the next moment to do something truly weird but deeply true to their deepest natures, and from that something beautiful might arise.

Buy!

'Buy the appliance and your life will never be the same,' the salesman said as he drove his pitch to its climax. Pretty corny. But even though the guy had a steely edge, I was hooked. 'I really do need to slice my vegetables a whole new way,' I thought, '…and two for the price of one, no less!' I looked in my wallet and found nothing but dry cleaning slips. Then I noticed it almost 5 o'clock. 'Damn, gotta go,' I sighed thinking of all the potatoes I wasn't going to crinkle cut.

I walked next to the salesman's platform on the way out and looked up at him again. There was something dark in the corner of his mouth. 'That's gross,' I thought, 'What the hell is that?'

It was blood.

Somewhere during his spiel he'd bitten his lip or burst a vein or some such. Whatever it was or however much it hurt, he didn't stop. 'This sales thing is a primal business,' I thought as I waited for the bus. I changed my mind and decided to walk by the stables on on my way to Time Square.

'That's the world, man, you gotta sell or die.'