Month: July 2014

Philosophy prof Robert Pasnau relays (NYT) a well-worn story usually told at the expense of his colleagues that goes something like this: Charles II summons a group of philosophers to ask them why a dead fish weighs more than a live one. After offering their creative, speculative answers, the king tells the philosophers that there was no difference between the two – and why didn’t they just weigh the fish? Pasnau rejects the implied criticism of his field:

The essence of philosophy is abstract reasoning – not because the philosopher is too lazy to attempt a more hands-on approach, but because the subjects at issue do not readily submit to it.

If we could simply weigh the fish, we gladly would. In recent centuries, philosophers in fact have discovered how to weigh that allegorical fish, in various fields, and on each occasion a new discipline has been born: physics in the 17th century; chemistry in the 18th; biology in the 19^th and psychology in the 20th. The scientists, short on history but flush with their government grants and Nobel Prizes, cast an eye back on what remains of philosophy and skeptically ask: Why don’t you stop wasting your time and just weigh that fish?

It’s a question philosophers ask themselves all the time, and sometimes they despair.

How Pasnau frames his own defense of his field’s relevance:

[M]uch of what gives philosophy its continuing fascination is its connection with the humanities. To weigh the fish is doubtless desirable, but there is just as much to be learned in understanding where that fish came from, and in telling stories about where it might go.

If even philosophy is dismissed as a waste of time for being insufficiently scientific, where does that leave those other modes of humanistic inquiry? Reading Plato or Chekhov may not stop the planet from warming or cure a disease – or help build more accurate missiles – and it may not point the way toward a new science of ethics or will. Yet what of it? Does such inquiry not have a value of its own? That is of course itself a philosophical question.

Recently we pointed to the debate generated by Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent memoir, Living with a Wild God, about a powerful, mystical experience she had at 18 and how she believes scientists could do a better job of understanding such brushes with the numinous. Reviewing the book, A.C. Grayling expresses disappointment at Ehrenreich’s edging away from the view that “it is the brain, and nothing mysterious outside it, that produces these experiences”:

It is well known and richly recorded that such episodes can be induced by dancing or repetitive whirling, as with the Sufi Dervishes; by starvation, fever, alcohol, hallucinogenic mushrooms, sexual activity, and much besides. Religious people, of course, attribute them to encounters with the divine, and it may well be that experiences caused in these ways lie at the root of humankind’s impulse to create religion. But the fact that empirical science today so well explains the causes and nature of these disturbances of normal neurological function is reason to guard against the supernaturalistic attempts at explanation, which were once the only resource our forebears had.

But alas, as her book approaches its end, Ehrenreich departs from rational ways of understanding her own experiences, and begins to sketch a view to the effect that there is indeed Something — she calls it the Other.

Why he believes such experiences shouldn’t change our view of reality:

No doubt having such experiences powerfully inclines one to project their cause to something outside the mind. We do not tolerate anomaly very well and need to give it a name and an explanation in order to cope. But the merest respect for economy of explanation should be a bulwark against externalizing the source of anomalous experiences before all the more likely explanations are exhausted. We should always remember that the mind is a great player of tricks: one can induce Ehrenreich-type experiences in the lab, or by popping certain kinds of pills, no Other and no Mystery required. It is accordingly a surprise and — let it be confessed — a disappointment to find so doughty a heroine of her causes sliding away from Athens to — well, if not to Jerusalem than to some other Eastern locus of the ineffable, the unnamable, and the smoky.

I repeat: it is a disappointment when a rational person’s thinking about the unusual, the unexpected, the extraordinary, the amazing experiences of transcendence and unity that many of us have at heightened moments of life, suffers a declension into quasi-religious or supernaturalistic vagueness. The human brain is complicated enough to produce all these experiences from its own resources; we need no fairies in the garden to explain how roses bloom.

Friedersdorf relays a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival about the evolution of religion spurred by an audience question about mixing and matching elements of various faith traditions, and even if you can be religious without believing in God. Leon Wieseltier was skeptical of such trends:

“To call oneself a Muslim, a Jew, or a Catholic, what do the continuities have to be?” he asked. “You cannot simply erase the entirety of the religion that preceded you and call yourself a Jew. You can say that there is this tradition that is X,Y, and Z, interpret as you choose, state your reasons. It’s a free country, this is the kind of Jew you want to be. What worries me is that the new forms will be so disconnected from the traditions that something called Judaism will survive but that the tradition in its richness may not. That is my deepest fear about my faith.”

Professor Molly Worthen, another panelist, expressed a related concern. “Call me old fashioned, but yes, I would say, to be a good Catholic you have to believe in God,” she said. “There’s a problem with the hyper-individualization of Millennial religion. The advantage of an institution is that it forces you into conversation with people you might not agree with. It forces you to grapple with a tradition that includes hard ideas. It forces you to have, for at least part of your life, a respect for authority that inculcates the sense that you have something to learn, that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but that millennia have come before you. The structure of institutions, for all their evils, facilitates that. And we may be losing that.”

Wieseltier posited that it’s being lost because Americans are trying to bring to their religious experience the same level of customization that they expect when shopping. “They treat their tradition as consumers–or let’s say, consumers with loyalty to one store.”

Dreher nods:

A Christian friend of the Millennial generation and I were talking recently.

She’s been living on the West Coast, and says that the shift in attitude among her friends, even Christian ones, on the gay marriage issue has been rapid and stark. I don’t want to put words into her mouth — she reads this blog, so she may wish to clarify her thoughts — but as I recall from our conversation, the velocity and ferocity of the shift has left her disoriented. The issue went from something up for discussion to “the conversation is over — and you had better be on the right side” virtually overnight.

One thing that worries and depresses my friend is that there seems to be no basis for a conversation about why we believe what we believe. The assumption now seems to be that your beliefs don’t have to cohere, or even cohere within a religious tradition; it’s expected that you pick and choose your beliefs, so you will be held responsible for affirming those that the Church of What’s Happening Now declares to be bigotry, or outmoded.

I told my friend about how difficult it is to have a meaningful conversation about religion because nobody takes religion seriously, not even most religious people. I used to get into arguments with Catholic friends over Catholic teaching, which I defended (even after I left the Catholic Church). It would drive me nuts because I would build an argument based on official Catholic teaching … and get nowhere. Though identifying as Catholics, these folks felt not the least obligation to yield to the teaching authority of the Catholic institution. They believed that because they were Catholics by birth and baptism, whatever they wanted to believe didn’t make them any less Catholic. It was impossible to have a meaningful discussion with Catholics who didn’t feel bound by the basic teachings of the Catholic Church. No connection to the traditions or the thinking of the Church.

Wieseltier’s right: truth and falsity on these questions really don’t matter to Americans anymore. What matters is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It is the universal solvent of religious tradition in America.

In an interview about his new film Deliver Us from Evil, which is based on real-life investigations of paranormal activity and demonic possession by NYPD sergeant Ralph Sarchie, director Scott Derrickson explains the connection between his love for Flannery O’Connor and making horror films:

Flannery O’Connor is my creative hero. I think she’s the greatest American writer. Her book, Mystery and Manners, is my creative bible. I’m humbled by the comparison. She’s a true American treasure.

She said to the deaf you have to shout and to the blind you have to draw large and startling pictures. That phrase itself is as good of an apologetic for horror as you’re ever going to speak.

What I love about her work and what I’m still learning is the manner in which she trusted the complexities of narrative to place her readers in the right range to gather what they needed or to miss it if they weren’t prepared for it. In the end her stories are like moral mazes, and you’re not going to be able to get to the end and have a clean takeaway but she will have placed you in an arena of thought until you’ve worked something out. She does all that while being shocking and entertaining and giving you a great tale. If there’s an artist’s philosophy that I aspire to, it’s hers. There’s a love of mystery there.

He goes on to describe how he showed his actors tapes of real exorcisms – and what he makes of their reality:

[S]ome of what happens in the movie is true to life. I’ve seen a guy being held down and his forehead all of a sudden opens up on its own and starts bleeding. If you’re a materialist skeptic you’re going to have to deny that it happened. But Ralph Sarchie was there and saw it. Some of these extreme things really happen.

But what makes it scary is not those inexplicable things, it’s the depth of human suffering that you’re witnessing and the unrelenting banality of evil and the sense of alien presence in these people and the credibility of the testimony of the people who’ve gone through it.

I didn’t show Eric [Bana] one tape; I showed him a bunch of tapes. I even showed him some Islamic exorcisms. This isn’t just a Christian phenomenon. This is an anthropological reality. When the disciples came to Jesus complaining of someone casting out demons even though he was not one of their followers—Jesus says let him do it, because he’s still helping people.

It’s not as wildly dramatic as what it is in The Exorcist or my film but it’s more dramatic than people think. But what’s deeply frightening or disturbing about it is not the paranormal activity; it is the profundity of human suffering at work.

Recent Dish on exorcisms here.