Red Cedar

Ohhh, the morality!

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Megan

This morning before work, I sat in bed with my morning coffee and read through a lecture on Pilgrim’s Progress which confirmed for me some initial thoughts I had upon reading Bunyan’s book – one of the most influential and popular works of literature ever written. These initial thoughts?

Puritanism (Radical Protestantism) is a selfish doctrine.
The Puritans hated nature.
Bunyan’s character Christian finds echoes in the evangelical Christianity of today.

Before I go any further, let me say that I do not hate religion (though I find it a highly questionable organization of power), and I highly value the act of pilgrimage as a spiritual and contemplative practice – but the Pilgrim’s Progress is a work promoting an almost-ruthless individualism which is counter to any spirituality I would willingly embrace. I recognize, of course, that this emphasis is only one of many, and that Bunyan’s work must be taken in the context it was written (shortly after the Reformation) – sadly, many evangelicals carry this same perspective forward today.

For those of you unfamiliar with the work, Pilgrim’s Progress was written in 1678 as an allegorical tale of one man’s journey to the Celestial City atop Mt. Zion. The character – so-named Christian – is helped along the way by “Evangelist” and meets with many unsavory people along the way who seek only to hinder his path or who are otherwise to be judged unfit to enter the city (Obstinate, Pliable, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair, Hypocrisy, Timorous, Ignorance to name a few). Before Christian sets off, he is weighed down by a terrible burden which he fears will cause him to sink into hell. It is to relieve himself of this burden (his sins) that he sets off, leaving his family (wife and several children) behind. (In the second part, Christian returns and leads the way for his wife who initially hesitates because she is too attached to the world.) As you can tell, the allegory is pretty straight-forward and easy to follow, ending with Christian’s final test and his entry into the Celestial City in which he is welcomed.

Returning to my three initial impressions, here are some notes on each:

Puritanism is a selfish doctrine: The character of Christian basically starts off by abandoning his wife and family. Never mind that in Part 2 he comes back, when he leaves on the original pilgrimage he has no way of knowing whether he will be able to return, or even where he is going exactly. Basically, his spiritual needs are much greater than the needs his family has of him and that’s that. So off he goes on an individualized quest in which he must valiantly resist the meanies and fools he encounters – each one of them judged because they do not have the temerity of this intrepid pilgrim. Throughout, we see Christian receive help from others (like Evangalist, and the House Beautiful, and Hopeful) but we do not see him extend the offer of help unless it also benefits himself (as when he frees himself from the imprisonment of the Giant of Despair and Hopeful is freed with him).

Interestingly, the lecture mentioned at the start of the post goes into some detail about the transition from the “good works” focus of the Catholic Church (ie: Good works get us into heaven) to the “good faith” doctrine of the Protestant Reformation (good works seemed too much like bargaining with God, they maintained that if anything was going to get you into heaven it was perfect faith). This simplified things for the character Christian who was allowed by virtue of his religion to ignore the needs of others (like his *family* and other stragglers on the road) in order to receive the tests of his faith without impediment.

I can accept that pilgrimage is ultimately an individual act – even when traveled with others – because the progress of spiritual conversion/renewal/accomplishment is so much one that happens internally. What I have trouble accepting is that one’s spiritual salvation takes precedence over the needs of every other, including willingly-taken-on responsibilities.

The Puritans hated nature: Like other people, nature is simply an obstacle to be overcome in this allegory. Names like the Slough of Despond, Valley of Humiliation, and the River of Death are indicative of how the main character experiences the natural world which is mostly treacherous and designed to impede him from meeting God. This is both a rejection of “worldliness” (that which ties us to this world) and “wildness” or wilderness which left man open to unknowable dangers. The beast Apollyon (“Destroyer”) is the most obvious representative of this mistrust of the natural world – hybrid of dragon, bear, human and fish – he is symbollic of the four elements and this is a fearfully powerful being. Sadly, this take on the natural world – as base, as destructive to the human soul, as dangerous – really demands of the Puritan that he bend nature to his will rather than adapt himself to it. I think we all see the outcome of this shift in thinking which begins around the 1500s and is a predominant feature of the governing philosophy of the world we live in.

Bunyan’s character Christian finds echoes in the evangelical Christianity of today: This one is a bit obvious because of course the evangelical church takes its doctrine from the radical Protestants – but it’s hard to ignore the paranoia and smug tone of Pilgrim’s Progress which sees *everyone* else who is not on the same path as Christian as either 1) an impediment, an intentional destroyer or 2) an idiot who doesn’t know enough to get educated about the good word of the Lord. Sound familiar? As I feel towards the modern-day evangelists, this work grated on me in its supercilious tone towards others – the antithesis of the golden rule, and far distanced from the Christ-figure who cared for all despite parentage, ignorance, profession or tribe. Again, sound familiar? I can’t help but feeling that Bunyan would have felt right at home in the television-chapels of today…..

I was originally going to pen a piece on the power of pilgrimage in response to this book, but by the time I had finished reading, I felt mostly frustration and the opposite of introspective. Rather than being a salve for a world in crisis, Pilgrim’s Progress exposes the core of a moralizing and self-righteous faith – a faith that predicated the killing of indigenous people, the destruction of wilderness, and the erection of temples to arrogance and selfishness in the new world. It’s presented as logic, of course, the figure of reason fighting off the passions of the world – the individual against it all. As if there is no other way. As if responsibility to the family, responsibility the community, and caretaking the resources of the earth can only be seen as burdens on the road of life – lightened only by running off on a personal quest. And we live in a nation founded on this view of things! (Have I mentioned enough lately that ideas matter? They do. They really do.)

I highly recommend you check out the lecture at the beginning of this post if you are looking for more edification on the context that Bunyan wrote in, but I’m not particularly inclined to recommend reading Pilgrim’s Progress unless you like your Christianity rigid, with a dash of moral smugness. Like the God of Genesis – this is nothing I can embrace, though learn from it I have.

Irreducible existence.

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Megan

4 Comments

I’m afraid that my post on Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) is going to be a bit tangential. And perhaps a bit of a cheat, because I want to focus entirely on his maxim: I think therefore I am and what I feel about that statement in light of notions of technological singularity and the futurism of the brain. That feels like cheating to me because I am not mining the text for some gem of insight – but really I don’t feel like delving into whether Descartes’ “proof” for the existence of God has merit or not at the moment – so there we are.

“I think therefore I am” is probably one of the most famous maxims in western thought. First posited by Descartes’ in Discourse on the Method, it forms the basis for his philosophical proof of existence and is an expression of his mind-body dualism. In this conception of human existence the mind and body are separate from each other – “I think therefore” not only proves existence – but it squarely places existence in the mind rather than the body. Another way of putting this is expressed in the term by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle “ghost in the machine,” whereby the human body is merely the mechanical cage which houses the immaterial mind. Or to put it another way, we are all just brains in a pod a la the film The Matrix which is about as Cartesian in outlook as it gets.

As is technological singularity – which came up on my Facebook wall this week (in relation to something really tangential from this whole topic) – a nice serendipity while I was re-reading Descartes’ Dicsourse. During our Saturday class, one of my peers made the comment that they did not understand how the mind could be seen as independent from the body since the mind would disappear when the body had physically ceased to be, making them the mind dependent on the body and not separated. And here is where “the singularity” would take Descartes to the next logical level – this would be the futuristic study and development of the mind-machine merge. In this future, not only would machines develop higher intelligence than humans currently hold, but a fusing of the biological with the programmable would allow for humans to possess that higher intellectual capacity. Not only that, the upload of minds into actual (not metaphorical) machines would give humans a kind of immortality that Descartes could never have dreamed of. Of course there is more to “the singularity” than this, but for the purpose of this post I am going to stop here for the discussion.

Rather than arguing about whether or not the technology forecast by the futurists is a possibility, or would ever be made accessible to us garden-variety humans – I am going to go back to the dualism of Descartes and probe this a bit further. What we are basically looking at here is “substance” dualism which divides mind and matter into two fundamentally different substances. Because of this substance division, the mind can never be reduced to the physical body and its mechanics. This is quite a lot like the religious conception of the soul which also views the body as the material substance which houses the ephemeral being. The problem with this of course is the question of how the material could have an impact on the immaterial, and also how the immaterial could impact the material. How does the mind/body intersection work if we are rendered of two completely different substances?

As strange a problem as that seems to be, watching a film like The Matrix (1999) reminds us of the prevalence of this idea in our culture. That we could believe in humans imprisoned in pods by their robot overlords and hooked up to a computer which synthesizes human life, belies our acceptance of the idea that our experience does rest solely in our minds. Watching that film we don’t say – “that’s preposterous” because so much of rationalist discourse is predicated on this very belief. And its this belief which gives hope to the futurists who wish to transmit that ephemeral mind into a different machine when our own physical bodies “give up the ghost”(pun intended). (Unlike Descartes, the film posits emotional existence as part of the mind, which the philosopher had reduced down a reasoning device only).

On the other side of things – the material body side – remember the human genome project? That was the gene-mapping project that scientists promised us would get to the bottom of “what makes us human”. By mapping the genes of animals and humans alike, we were supposed to discover what fundamental genetic building blocks separated us from each other – a definitive proof for human existence on the physical side. What we actually discovered is that humans have two more chromosome pairs than rats. Okay – we found out a lot more than that – but when it actually came down to the divisions between one species and the next, counting chromosomes didn’t turn out to tell us much more about what makes a human, human and what makes a rat, rat.

Like the human genome researchers, the futurists promoting technological singularity rely on Cartesian dualism in their optimism. But I’m afraid that like the genomic researchers, they will only be disappointed if they believe this is the path to immortality. I have a hard time understanding how this type of division is supportable with all the science of the past two decades showing that intelligence and “the brain” is located throughout the body, that our nervous system informs our emotional well-being in complex ways, and – most important at all – that our emotions are not separate from our rational beings. (At the end of this course we are reading Antonia Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain which I haven’t read yet – but does examine the faults of dualism from a scientific perspective.)

Of course Spinoza argued way back in 1677 that the mind and body were one continuous and seamless unit – but of course that would have contaminated the notion of “pure reason” and so his perspective was set to the side. This has allowed all sorts of fantasy notions about human reason, now (through the genome project and the singularity) informs fantasies about ultimately discovering humanity through one side (or other) of the duality that is supposedly comprises our composition.

None of this is really gets to the correct philosophical response to Descartes, of course. I am not using logic to out-argue the sentence “I think therefore I am.” Nor do I believe that the statement itself is off-base. One of the ways we understand that we exist *is* through our thoughts. But it is also through our feelings. And while we may know of our existence through our thoughts, this does not leave them unsullied by the neurological impulses of our beings. Not that one could expect Descartes to have understood that in the 17th century (after all, as he noted, he couldn’t possibly perform *all* the scientific experiments himself) – but I am challenged by the notion of mind-uploaded-to-computer equals immortality. I am also challenged by why anyone would want to live on indefinitely, or why anyone would want to live purely in the intellect when there is so much great physical pleasure that we would miss out on – and no, I don’t believe that is programmable.

PS. I should very quickly note before breaking off here that I do believe that super-intelligence is possible with machines – and I don’t reject the singularity futurists outright – but I do question the continuation down the Cartesian path when so much of our current science challenges us to think otherwise.)

PPS. You know what else the singularity futurists make me think of when I see headlines like Time Magazine proclaiming immortality by 2045? Flying cars. It seems to me that flying cars have been a promise of the future for some decades now, but as far as I can tell we’re nowhere near those either.

PPPS. Also, I don’t think the problems on the planet are due to a lack of intelligence (the singularists super-intelligence is supposedly going to save us all from ourselves). We know full well *what* to do, we just don’t want to do it.
Okay. Enough!